Peter Tompkins The Secret Life Of Plants

The Secret Life
of Plants

A fascinating account of the
physical, emotional, and spiritual
between plants and man.

Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird
authors of Secrets of the Soil

“Once in a while you find a book that stuns you. Its scope leaves

you breathless. This is such a book.” - John White, San Francisco Chronicle

THE SECRET LIFE
OF PLANTS

Peter Tompkins

AND

Christopher Bird

HarpcrCollins Publishers India

HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt Ltd

7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002
First Published by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird 1973
First published in India by
HarperCollins Publishers India 2000
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.

ISBN 81-7223-408-2
Printed in India by
Rekha Printer Pvt Ltd
A-102/1 Okhla Industrial Area
New Delhi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction viii

PARTI

MODERN RESEARCH

1 Plants and ESP

3

2 Plants Can Read Your Mind

17

3 Plants That Open Doors

33

4 Visitors from Space

46

5 Latest Soviet Discoveries

63

PART II

PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

6 Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times

81

7 The Metamorphosis of Plants

104

8 Plants Will Grow to Please You

120

9 Wizard of Tuskegee

135

PART III

TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

10 The Harmonic Life of Plants 145

11 Plants and Electromagnetism 163

12 Force Fields, Humans and Plants 178

13 The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras 200

PART IV

CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

14 Soil: The Staff of Life 217

15 Chemicals, Plants and Man 240

16 Live Plants or Dead Planets 259

17 Alchemists in the Garden 274

PART V

THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

18 Dowsing Plants for Health 295

19 Radionic Pesticides 317

20 Mind Over Matter 343

21 Findhorn and the Garden of Eden 361

Bibliography 375

Index 393

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express their gratitude to all who have helped
them in the compilation of this book, which required extensive research
in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

They are especially grateful to the staff of the U.S. Library of Congress
and in particular to Legare H. B. Obear, Chief of the Loan
Division, and to his most helpful assistants. In the Stack and Reader
Division, they wish to thank Dudley B. Ball, Roland C. Maheux, William
Sartain, Lloyd A. Pauls, and Benjamin Swinson, who saved them
much anxiety by caring for their shelved books.

Thanks are also due to Robert V. Allen of the Slavic and Central
European Division, and Dolores Moyano Martin, of the Latin American
Division, Library of Congress, and to Lida L. Allen of the National
Agricultural Library, Beltsville, Maryland.

Very special thanks are due to two Muscovite scientists, biophysicist
Dr. Viktor Adamenko, well known for his research on bio-energetics,
and Professor Sinikov, Director of Studies; of the Timiryazev Academy
of Agricultural Sciences, both of whom kindly and promptly replied to
requests for data and references unavailable in the United States, as did
M. Rostislav Donn, Commercial Counselor of the French Embassy in
Moscow.

Lastly the authors are grateful to their respective helpmates, without
whom the book would never have reached the printer.

Introduction

Short of Aphrodite, there is nothing lovelier on this planet than a flower,
nor more essential than a plant. The true matrix of human life is the
greensward covering mother earth. Without green plants we would
neither breathe nor eat. On the undersurface of every leaf a million
movable lips are engaged in devouring carbon dioxide and expelling
oxygen. All together, 25 million square miles of leaf surface are daily
engaged in this miracle of photosynthesis, producing oxygen and food
for man and beast.

Of the 375 billion tons of food we consume each yearthe bulk comes
from plants, which synthesize it out of air and soil with the help of

viH INTRODUCTION

sunlight. The remainder comes from animal products, which in turn are
derived from plants. All the food, drink, intoxicants, drugs and medicines
that keep man alive and, if properly used, radiantly healthy are ours
through the sweetness of photosynthesis. Sugar produces all our
starches, fats, oils, waxes, cellulose. From crib to coffin, man relies on
cellulose as the basis for his shelter, clothing, fuel, fibers, basketry,
cordage, musical instruments, and the paper on which he scribbles his
philosophy. The abundance of plants profitably used by man is indicated
by nearly six hundred pages in Uphof's Dictionary of Economic Plants.
Agriculture-as the economists agree-is the basis for a nation's wealth.
Instinctively aware of the aesthetic vibrations of plants, which are
spiritually satisfying, human beings are happiest and most comfortable
when living with flora. At birth, marriage, death, blossoms are prerequisites,
as they are at mealtime or festivities. We give plants and flowers
as tokens of love, of friendship, or homage, and of thanks for hospitality.

Our houses are adorned with gardens, our cities with parks, our nations
with national preserves. The first thing a woman does to make a room
livable is to place a plant in it or a vase of fresh cut flowers. Most men,
if pressed, might describe paradise, whether in heaven or on earth, as
a garden filled with luxuriant orchids, uncut, frequented by a nymph or
two.

Aristotle's dogma that plants have souls but no sensation lasted
through the Middle Ages and into the eighteenth century, when Carl
von Linne, grandfather of modem botany, declared that plants differ
from animals and humans only in their lack of movement, a conceit
which was shot down by the great nineteenth-century botanist Charles
Darwin, who proved that every tendril has its power of independent
movement. As Darwin put it, plants "acquire and display this power only
when it is of some advantage to them."

At the beginning of the twentieth century a gifted Viennese biologist
with the Gallic name of Raoul France put forth the idea, shocking to
contemporary natural philosophers, that plants move their bodies as
freely, easily, and gracefully as the most skilled animal or human, and
that the only reason we don't appreciate the fact is that plants do so at
a much slower pace than humans.

INTRODUCTION IX

The roots of plants, said France, burrow inquiringly into the earth,
the buds and twigs swing in definite circles, the leaves and blossoms
bend and shiver with change, the tendrils circle questingly and reach out
with ghostly arms to feel their surroundings. Man, said France, merely
thinks plants motionless and feelingless because he will not take the time
to watch them.

Poets and philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
Rudolf Steiner, who took the trouble to watch plants, discovered that
they grow in opposite directions, partly burrowing into the ground as if
attracted by gravity, partly shooting up into the air as if pulled by some
form of antigravity, or levity.

Wormlike rootlets, which Darwin likened to a brain, burrow constantly
downward with thin white threads, crowding themselves firmly
into the soil, tasting it as they go. Small hollow chambers in which a ball
of starch can rattle indicate to the root tips the direction of the pull of
gravity.

When the earth is dry, the roots turn toward moister ground, finding
their way into buried pipes, stretching, as in the case of the lowly alfalfa
plant, as far as forty feet, developing an energy that can bore through
concrete. No one has yet counted the roots of a tree, but a study of a
single rye plant indicates a total of over 13 million rootlets with a
combined length of 380 miles. On these rootlets of a rye plant are fine
root hairs estimated to number some 14 billion with a total length of
6,600 miles, almost the distance from pole to pole.

As the special burrowing cells are worn out by contact with stones,
pebbles, and large grains of sand, they are rapidly replaced, but when
they reach a source of nourishment they die and are replaced by cells
designed to dissolve mineral salts and collect the resulting elements.

This basic nourishment is passed from cell to cell up through the plant,
which constitutes a single unit of protoplasm, a watery or gelatinous
substance considered the basis of physical life.

The root is thus a water pump, with water acting as a universal solvent,
raising elements from root to leaf, evaporating and falling back to earth
to act once more as the medium for this chain of life. The leaves of an
ordinary sunflower will transpire in a day as much water as a man

X INTRODUCTION

perspires. On a hot day a single birch can absorb as much as four
hundred quarts, exuding cooling moisture through its leaves.

No plant, says France, is without movement; all growth is a series of
movements; plants are constantly preoccupied with bending, turning
and quivering. He describes a summer day with thousands of polyplike
arms reaching from a peaceful arbor, trembling, quivering in their eagerness
for new support for the heavy stalk that grows behind them. When
the tendril, which sweeps a full circle in sixty-seven minutes, finds a
perch, within twenty seconds it starts to curve around the object, and
within the hour has wound itself so firmly it is hard to tear away. The
tendril then curls itself like a corkscrew and in so doing raises the vine
to itself.

A climbing plant which needs a prop will creep toward the nearest
support. Should this be shifted, the vine, within a few hours, will change
its course into the new direction. Can the plant see the pole? Does it
sense it in some unfathomed way? If a plant is growing between obstructions
and cannot see a potential support it will unerringly grow toward
a hidden support, avoiding the area where none exists.

Plants, says France, are capable of intent- they can stretch toward, or
seek out, what they want in ways as mysterious as the most fantastic
creations of romance.

Far from existing inertly, the inhabitants of the pasture-or what the
ancient Hellenes called botone-appear to be able to perceive and to
react to what is happening in their environment at a level of sophistication
far surpassing that of humans.

The sundew plant will grasp at a fly with infallible accuracy, moving
in just the right direction toward where the prey is to be found. Some
parasitical plants can recognize the slightest trace of the odor of their
victim, and will overcome all obstacles to crawl in its direction.

Plants seem to know which ants will steal their nectar, closing when
these ants are about, opening only when there is enough dew on their
stems to keep the ants from climbing. The more sophisticated acacia
actually enlists the protective services of certain ants which it rewards
with nectar in return for the ants' protection against other insects and
herbivorous mammals.

INTRODUCTION XI

Is it chance that plants grow into special shapes to adapt to the
idiosyncrasies of insects which will pollinate them, luring these insects
with special color and fragrance, rewarding them with their favorite
nectar, devising extraordinary canals and Horal machinery with which to
ensnare a bee so as to release it through a trap door only when the
pollination process is completed?

Is it really nothing but a reflex or coincidence that a plant such as the
orchid Trichoceros parviflorus will grow its petals to imitate the female
of a species of fly so exactly that the male attempts to mate with it and
in so doing pollinates the orchid? Is it pure chance that night-blossoming
flowers grow white the better to attract night moths and night-flying
butterflies, emitting a stronger fragrance at dusk, or that the carrion lily
develops the smell of rotting meat in areas where only flies abound,
whereas flowers which rely on the wind to cross-pollinate the species do
not waste energy on making themselves beautiful, fragrant or appealing
to insects, but remain relatively unattractive?

To protect themselves plants develop thorns, a bitter taste, or gummy
secretions that catch and kill unfriendly insects. The timorous Mimosa
pudica has a mechanism which reacts whenever a beetle or an ant or
a worm crawls up its stem toward its delicate leaves: as the intruder
touches a spur the stem raises, the leaves fold up, and the assailant is
either rolled off the branch by the unexpected movement or is obliged
to draw back in fright.

Some plants, unable to find nitrogen in swampy land, obtain it by
devouring living creatures. There are more than five hundred varieties
of carnivorous plants, eating any kind of meat from insect to beef, using
endlessly cunning methods to capture their prey, from tentacles to sticky
hairs to funnel-like traps. The tentacles of carnivorous plants are not only
mouths but stomachs raised on poles with which to seize and eat their
prey, to digest both meat and blood, and leave nothing but a skeleton.
Insect-devouring sundews pay no attention to pebbles, bits of metal,
or other foreign substances placed on their leaves, but are quick to sense
the nourishment to be derived from a piece of meat. Darwin found that
the sundew can be excited when a piece of thread is laid on it weighing
no more than 1/78,000 of a grain. A tendril, which next to the rootlets

XU INTRODUCTION

constitutes the most sensitive portion of a plant, will bend if a piece of
silk thread is laid across it weighing but .00025 of a gram.

The ingenuity of plants in devising forms of construction far exceeds
that of human engineers. Man-made structures cannot match the supply
strength of the long hollow tubes that support fantastic weights against
terrific storms. A plant's use of fibers wrapped in spirals is a mechanism
of great resistance against tearing not yet developed by human ingenuity.
Cells elongate into sausages or Hat ribbons locked one to the
other to form almost unbreakable cords. As a tree grows upward it
scientifically thickens to support the greater weight.

The Australian eucalyptus can raise its head on a slim trunk above the
ground 480 feet, or as high as the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and certain
walnuts can hold a harvest of 100,000 nuts. The Virginia knotweed can
tie a sailor's knot which is put to such a strain when it dries that it snaps;
hurling the seeds to germinate as far as possible from mother.

Plants are even sentient to orientation and to the future. Frontiersmen
and hunters in the prairies of the Mississippi Valley discovered a
sunflower plant, Silphium laciniatum, whose leaves accurately indicate
the points of the compass. Indian licorice, or Arbrus precatorius, is so
keenly sensitive to all forms of electrical and magnetic influences it is
used as a weather plant. Botanists who first experimented with it in
London's Kew Gardens found in it a means for predicting cyclones,
hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

So accurate are alpine flowers about the seasons, they know when
spring is coming and bore their way up through lingering snowbanks,
developing their own heat with which to melt the snow.

Plants which react so certainly, so variously, and so promptly to the
outer world, must, says France, have some means of communicating
with the outer world, something comparable or superior to our senses.
France insists that plants are constantly observing and recording events
and phenomena of which man-trapped in his anthropocentric view of
the world, subjectively revealed to him through his five senses-knows
nothing.

Whereas plants have been almost universally looked upon as senseless
automata, they have now been found to be able to distinguish between
sounds inaudible to the human ear and color wavelengths such as infra-

INTRODUCTION xil 7

red and ultraviolet invisible to the human eye; they are specially sensitive
to X-rays and to the high frequency of television.

The whole vegetal world, says France, lives responsive to the movement
of the earth and its satellite moon, to the movement of the other
planets of our solar system, and one day will be shown to be affected by
the stars and other cosmic bodies in the universe.

As the external form of a plant is kept a unit and restored whenever
part of it is destroyed, France assumes there must be some conscious
entity supervising the entire form , some intelligence directing the plant,
either from within, or from without.

Over half a century ago France, who believed plants to be possessed
of all the attributes of living creatures including "the most violent
reaction against abuse and the most ardent gratitude for favors," could
have written a Secret Life of Plants, but what he had already put into
print was either ignored by the establishment or considered heretically
shocking. What shocked them most was his suggestion that the awareness
of plants might originate in a supramaterial world of cosmic beings
to which, long before the birth of Christ, the Hindu sages referred as
"devas" and which, as fairies, elves, gnomes, sylphs and a host of other
creatures, were a matter of direct vision and experience to clairvoyants
among the Celts and other sensitives. The idea was considered by
vegetal scientists to be as charmingly jejune as it was hopelessly romantic.
It has taken the startling discoveries of several scientific minds in the
1960s to bring the plant world sharply back to the attention of mankind.
Even so there are skeptics who find it hard to believe that plants may
at last be the bridesmaids at a marriage of physics and metaphysics.
Evidence now supports the vision of the poet and the philosopher that
plants are living, breathing, communicating creatures, endowed with
personality and the attributes of soul. It is only we, in our blindness, who
have insisted on considering them automata. Most extraordinary, it now
appears that plants may be ready, willing, and able to cooperate with
humanity in the Flerculean job of turning this planet back into a garden
from the squalor and corruption of what England's pioneer ecologist
William Cobbett would have called a "wen."

XIV INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

Plants and ESP

The dust-grimed window 01 the office building lacing New York's Times
Square reflected, as through a looking glass, an extraordinary corner 01
Wonderland. There was no White Rabbit with waistcoat and watch
chain, only an elfin-eared fellow called Backster with a galvanometer and
a house plant called Dracaena massangeana. The galvanometer was
there because Cleve Backster was America's foremost lie-detector examiner;
the dracaena because Backster's secretary felt the bare office should
have a touch of green; Backster was there because of a fatal step taken
in the 1960s which radically affected his life, and may equally affect the
planet.

Backster's antics with his plants, headlined in the world press, became
the subject of skits, cartoons, and lampoons; but the Pandora's box
which he opened for science may never again be closed. Backster's
discovery that plants appear to be sentient caused strong and varied
reaction round the globe, despite the fact that Backster never claimed
a discovery, only an uncovering of what has been known and forgotten.
Wisely he chose to avoid publicity, and concentrated on establishing the
absolute scientific bona fides of what has come to be known as the
"Backster Effect."

The adventure started in 1966. Backster had been up all night in his
school for polygraph examiners, where he teaches the art of lie detection
to policemen and security agents from around the world. On impulse
he decided to attach the electrodes of one of his lie detectors to the leaf
of his dracaena. The dracaena is a tropical plant similar to a palm tree,
with large leaves and a dense cluster of small flowers; it is known as the
dragon tree (Latin draco) because of the popular myth that its resin
yields dragon blood. Backster was curious to see if the leaf would be
affected by water poured on its roots, and if so, how, and how soon.

As the plant thirstily sucked water up its stem, the galvanometer, to
Backster's surprise, did not indicate less resistance, as might have been
expected by the greater electrical conductivity of the moister plant. The
pen on the graph paper, instead of trending upward, was trending
downward, with a lot of sawtooth motion on the tracing.

A galvanometer is that part of a polygraph lie detector which, when
attached to a human being by wires through which a weak current of
electricity is run, will cause a needle to move, or a pen to make a tracing
on a moving graph of paper, in response to mental images, or the
slightest surges of human emotion. Invented at the end of the eighteenth
century by a Viennese priest. Father Maximilian Hell, S.J., court
astronomer to the Empress Maria Theresa, it was named after Luigi
Galvani, the Italian physicist and physiologist who discovered "animal
electricity." The galvanometer is now used in conjunction with an
electrical circuit called a "Wheatstone bridge," in honor of the English
physicist and inventor of the automatic telegraph. Sir Charles Wheatstone.

4 MODERN RESEARCH

Backster's antics with his plants, headlined in the world press, became
the subject of skits, cartoons, and lampoons; but the Pandora’s bo*
which he opened for science may never again be closed. Backster’s
discovery that plants appear to be sentient caused strong and varied
reaction round the globe, despite the fact that Backster never claimed
a discovery, only an uncovering of what has been known and forgotten.
Wisely he chose to avoid publicity, and concentrated on establishing the
absolute scientific bona fides of what has come to be known as the
“Backster Effect.”

1 he adventure started in 1966. Backster had been up all night in his
school for polygraph examiners, where he teaches the art of lie detection
to policemen and security agents from around the world. On impulse
he decided to attach the electrodes of one of his lie detectors to the leaf
of his dracaena. The dracaena is a tropical plant similar to a palm tree,
with large leaves and a dense cluster of small flowers; it is known as the
dragon tree (Latin draco) because of the popular myth that its resin
yields dragon blood. Backster was curious to see if the leaf would be
affected by water poured on its roots, and if so, how, and how soon.

As the plant thirstily sucked water up its stem, the galvanometer, to
Backster’s surprise, did not indicate less resistance, as might have been
expected by the greater electrical conductivity of the moister plant. The
pen on the graph paper, instead of trending upward, was trending
downward, with a lot of sawtooth motion on the tracing.

A galvanometer is that part of a polygraph lie detector which, when
attached to a human being by wires through which a weak current of
electricity is run, will cause a needle to move, or a pen to make a tracing
on a moving graph of paper, in response to mental images, or the
slightest surges of human emotion. Invented at the end of the eigh-
teenth century by a Viennese priest, Father Maximilian Hell, S.J., court
astronomer to the Empress Maria Theresa, it was named after Luigi
Galvani, the Italian physicist and physiologist who discovered “animal
electricity.” The galvanometer is now used in conjunction with an
electrical circuit called a “Wheatstone bridge,” in honor of the English
physicist and inventor of the automatic telegraph. Sir Charles Wheat¬
stone.

4 MODERN RESEARCH

In simple terms, the bridge balances resistance, so that the human
body’s electrical potential—or basic charge—can be measured as it
fluctuates under the stimulus of thought and emotion. The standard
police usage is to feed “carefully structured” questions to a suspect and
watch for those which cause the needle to jump. Veteran examiners,
such as Backster, claim they can identify deception from the patterns
produced on the graph.

Backster’s dragon tree, to his amazement, was giving him a reaction
very similar to that of a human being experiencing an emotional stimu¬
lus of short duration. Could the plant be displaying emotion?

What happened to Backster in the next ten minutes was to revolu¬
tionize his life.

The most effective way to trigger in a human being a reaction strong
enough to make the galvanometer jump is to threaten his or her well¬
being. Backster decided to do just that to the plant: he dunked a leaf
of the dracaena in the cup of hot coffee perennially in his hand. There
was no reaction to speak of on the meter. Backster studied the problem
several minutes, then conceived a worse threat: he would burn the actual
leaf to which the electrodes were attached. The instant he got the
picture of flame in his mind, and before he could move for a match,
there was a dramatic change in the tracing pattern on the graph in the
form of a prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. Backster had
not moved, either toward the plant or toward the recording machine.
Gould the plant have been reading his mind?

When Backster left the room and returned with some matches, he
found another sudden surge had registered on the chart, evidently
caused by his determination to carry out the threat. Reluctantly he set
about burning the leaf. This time there was a lower peak of reaction on
the graph. Later, as he went through the motions of pretending he
would bum the leaf, there was no reaction whatsoever. The plant ap¬
peared to be able to differentiate between real and pretended intent.

Backster felt like running into the street and shouting to the world.

Plants can think!” Instead he plunged into the most meticulous investi¬
gation of the phenomena in order to establish just how the plant was
reacting to his thoughts, and through what medium.

Plants and ESP 5

His first move was to make sure he had not overlooked any logical
explanation for the occurrence. Was there something extraordinary
about the plant? About him? About the particular polygraph instru¬
ment?

When he and his collaborators, using other plants and other instru¬
ments in other locations all over the country, were able to make similar
observations, the matter warranted further study. More than twenty-five
different varieties of plants and fruits were tested, including lettuce,
onions, oranges, and bananas. The observations, each similar to the
others, required a new view of life, with some explosive connotations for
science. Heretofore the debate between scientists and parapsychologists
on the existence of ESP, or extrasensory perception, has been fierce,
largely because of the difficulty of establishing unequivocally when such
a phenomenon is actually occurring. The best that has been achieved
so far in the field, by Dr. J. B. Rhine, who initiated his experiments in
ESP at Duke University, has been to establish that with human beings

the phenomenon seems to occur with greater odds than are attributable
to chance.

Backster first considered his plants' capacity for picking up his inten¬
tion to be some form of ESP; then he quarreled with the term. ESP is
held to mean perception above and beyond varieties of the established
five sensory perceptions of touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. As
plants give no evidence of eyes, ears, nose, or mouth, and as botanists
since Darwin's time have never credited them with a nervous system,
Backster concluded that the perceiving sense must be more basic.

This led him to hypothesize that the five senses in humans might be
limiting factors overlying a more “primary perception," possibly com¬
mon to all nature. “Maybe plants see better without eyes," Backster
surmised: “better than humans do with them." With the five basic
senses, humans have the choice, at will, of perceiving, perceiving poorly,
not perceiving at all. “If you don't like the looks of something,” said
Backster, you can look the other way, or not look. If everyone were to
be in everyone else's mind all the time it would be chaos.”

To discover what his plants could sense or feel, Backster enlarged his

office, and set about creating a proper scientific laboratory, worthy of the
space age.

6 MODERN RESEARCH

During the next few months, chart after chart was obtained from all
sorts of plants. The phenomenon appeared to persist even if the plant
leaf was detached from the plant, or if it was trimmed to the size of the
electrodes; amazingly, even if a leaf was shredded and redistributed
between the electrode surfaces there was still a reaction on the chart.
The plants reacted not only to threats from human beings, but to
unformulated threats, such as the sudden appearance of a dog in the
room or of a person wKo did not wish them well.

Backster was able to demonstrate to a group at Yale that the move¬
ments of a spider in the same room with a plant wired to his equipment
could cause dramatic changes in the recorded pattern generated by the
plant just before the spider started to scamper away from a human
attempting .to restrict its movement. “It seems,” said Backster, “as if
each of the spider’s decisions to escape was being picked up by the plant,
causing a reaction in the leaf.”

Under normal circumstances, plants may be attuned to each other,
said Backster, though when encountering animal life they tend to pay
less attention to what another plant may be up to. “The last thing a plant
expects is another plant to give it trouble. So long as there is animal life
around, they seem to be attuned to animal life. Animals and people are
mobile, and could need careful monitoring.”

If a plant is threatened with overwhelming danger or damage,
Backster observed that it reacts self-defensively in a way similar to an
opossum—or, indeed, to a human being—by “passing out,” or going
into a deep faint. The phenomenon was dramatically demonstrated one
day when a physiologist from Canada came to Backster’s lab to witness
the reaction of his plants. The first plant gave no response whatsoever.
Nor did the second; nor the third. Backster checked his polygraph
instruments, and tried a fourth and a fifth plant; still no success. Finally,

on the sixth, there was enough reaction to demonstrate the phenome¬
non.

Curious to discover what could have influenced the other plants,
Backster asked: “Does any part of your work involve harming plants?”

Yes,” the physiologist replied. “I terminate the plants I work with.
I put them in an oven and roast them to obtain their dry weight for my

analysis.”

Plants and ESP 7

r

Forty-five minutes after the physiologist was safely on the way to the
airport, each of Backster’s plants once more responded fluidly on the
graph.

This experience helped to bring Backster to the realization that plants
could intentionally be put into a faint, or mesmerized, by humans, that
something similar could be involved in the ritual of the slaughterer
before an animal is killed in the kosher manner. Communicating with
the victim, the killer may tranquilize it into a quiet death, also prevent¬
ing its flesh from having a residue of “chemical fear/' disagreeable tc
the palate and perhaps noxious to the consumer. This brought up the
possibility that plants and succulent fruits might wish to be eaten, but
only in a sort of loving ritual, with a real communication between the
eater and the eaten—somehow akin to the Christian rite of Communion
—instead of the usual heartless carnage.

“It may be,” says Backster, “that a vegetable appreciates becoming
part of another form of life rather than rotting on the ground, just as
a human at death may experience relief to find himself in a higher realm
of being.”

On one occasion, to show that plants and single cells were picking up
signals through some unexplained medium of communication, Backster
provided a demonstration for the author of an article appearing in the
Baltimore Sun, subsequently condensed in tbe Reader's Digest
Backster hooked a galvanometer to his philodendron, then addressed the
writer as if it were he who was on the meter, and interrogated him about
his year of birth.

Backster named each of seven years between 1925 and 1931 to whicli
the reporter was instructed to answer with a uniform “No,” Backstei
then selected from the chart the correct date, which had been indicatec
by the plant with an extra high flourish.

The same experiment was duplicated by a professional psychiatrist
the medical director of the research ward at Rockland State Hospital it
Orangeburg, New York, Dr. Aristide H. Esser. He and his collaborator
Douglas Dean, a chemist at Newark College of Engineering, experi
mented with a male subject who brought along a philodendron he hat
nursed from a seedling and had cared for tenderly.

3 MODERN RESEARCH

The two scientists attached a polygraph to the plant and then asked
the owner a series of questions, to some of which he had been instructed
to give false answers. The plant had no difficulty indicating through the
galvanometer the questions which were falsely answered; Dr. Esser, who
at first had laughed at Backster’s claim, admitted, “Pve had to eat my
own words.”

To see if a plant could display memory, a scheme was devised whereby
Backster was to try to identify the secret killer of one of two plants. Six
of Backster’s polygraph students volunteered for the experiment, some
of them veteran policemen. Blindfolded, the students drew from a hat
folded slips of paper, on one of which were instructions to root up, stamp
on, and thoroughly destroy one of two plants in a room. The criminal
was to commit the crime in secret; neither Backster nor any of the other
students was to know his identity; only the second plant would be a
witness.

By attaching the surviving plant to a polygraph and parading the
students one by one before it, Backster was able to establish the culprit.
Sure enough, the plant gave no reaction to five of the students, but
caused the meter to go wild whenever the actual culprit approached.
Backster was careful to point out that the plant could have picked up
and reflected the guilt feelings of the culprit; but as the villain had acted
in the interests of science, and was not particularly guilty, it left the
possibility that a plant could remember and recognize the source of
severe harm to its fellow.

In another series of observations, Backster noted that a special com¬
munion or bond of affinity appeared to be created between a plant and
its keeper, unaffected by distance. With the use of synchronized stop¬
watches, Backster was able to note that his plants continued to react to
his thought and attention from the next room, from down the hall, even
from several buildings away. Back from a fifteen-mile trip to New Jersey,
Backster was able to establish that his plants had perked up and shown
definite and positive signs of response—whether it was relief or welcome
he could not tell—at the very moment he had decided to return to New

York.

When Backster was away on a lecture tour and talked about his initial

Plants and ESP 9

1966 observation, showing a slide of the original dracaena, the plant,
back in his office, would show a reaction on the chart at the very time
he projected the slide,

Once attuned to a particular person, plants appeared to be able to
maintain a link with that person, no matter where he went, even among
thousands of people. On New Year’s Eve in New York City, Backster
went out into the bedlam of Times Square armed with a notebook and
stopwatch. Mingling with the crowd, he noted his various actions, such
as walking, running, going underground by way of subway stairs, nearly
getting run over, and having a mild fracas with a news vendor. Back at
the lab, he found that each of three plants, monitored independently,
showed similar reactions to his slight emotional adventures.

To see if he could get a reaction from plants at a much greater
distance, Backster experimented with a female friend to establish
whether her plants remained attuned to her on a seven-hundred-mile
plane ride across the United States. From synchronized clocks they
found a definite reaction from the plants to the friend’s emotional stress
each time the plane touched down for its landing.

To test a plant’s reaction at still greater distances, even millions of
miles, to see if space is a limit to the “primary perception” of his plants,
Backster would like the Mars probers to place a plant with a galvanome¬
ter on or near that planet so as to check by telemeter the plant’s reaction
to emotional changes in its caretaker at ground control on earth.

Since “telemetered” radio or TV signals traveling via electromagnetic
waves at the speed of light take between six and six and one-half minutes
to reach Mars and as many to return to Earth, the question was whether
an emotional signal from an earthbound human would reach Mars faster
than an electromagnetic wave or, as Backster suspects, the very instant
it was sent. Were the round-trip time for a telemetered message to be
cut in half it would indicate that mental or emotional messages operate
outside time as we conceive it, and beyond the electromagnetic spec¬
trum.

“We keep hearing about non-time-consuming communication from
Eastern philosophic sources,” says Backster. “They tell us that the
universe is in balance; if it happens to go out of balance someplace, you

10 MODERN RESEARCH

can't wait a hundred light-years for the imbalance to be detected and
corrected. This non-time-consuming communication, this oneness
among all living things, could be the answer.”

Backster has no idea what kind of energy wave may carry man’s
thoughts or internal feelings to a plant. He has tried to screen a plant
by placing it in a Faraday cage as well as in a lead container. Neither
shield appeared in any way to block or jam the communication channel
linking the plant to the human being. The carrier-wave equivalent,
whatever it might be, Backster concluded, must somehow operate
beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. It also appeared to operate from

the macrocosm down to the microcosm.

One day when Backster happened to cut his finger and dabbed it with
iodine, the plant that was being monitored on the polygraph immedi¬
ately reacted, apparently to the death of some cells in Backster’s finger.
Though it might have been reacting to his emotional state at the sight
of his own blood, or to the stinging of the iodine, Backster soon found
a recognizable pattern in the graph whenever a plant was witnessing the
death of some living tissue.

Could the plant, Backster wondered, be sensitive on a cellular level
all the way down to the death of individual cells in its environment?

On another occasion the typical graph appeared as Backster was
preparing to eat a cup of yogurt. This puzzled him till he realized there
was a chemical preservative in the jam he was mixing into the yogurt
that was terminating some of the live yogurt bacilli. Another inexplica¬
ble pattern on the chart was finally explained when it was realized the
plants were reacting to hot water being poured down the drain, which
was killing bacteria in the sink.

Backster’s medical consultant, the New Jersey cytologist Dr. Howard
Miller, concluded that some sort of “cellular consciousness” must be
common to all life.

To explore this hypothesis Backster found a way of attaching elec¬
trodes to infusions of all sorts of single cells, such as amoeba,
paramecium, yeast, mold cultures, scrapings from the human mouth,
blood, and even sperm. All were subject to being monitored on the
polygraph with charts just as interesting as those produced by the plants.

Plants and ESP 11

Sperm cells turned out to be surprisingly canny in that they seemed to
be capable of identifying and reacting to the presence of their own
donor, ignoring the presence of other males. Such observations seem to
imply that some sort of total memory may go down to the single cell,

and by inference that the brain may be just a switching mechanism, not
necessarily a memory storage organ.

'‘Sentience/' says Backster, “does not seem to stop at the cellular
level. It may go down to the molecular, the atomic and even the suba¬
tomic. All sorts of things which have been conventionally considered to
be inanimate may have to be re-evaluated."

Convinced of being on the track of a phenomenon of major impor¬
tance to science, Backster was anxious to publish his findings in a
scientific journal so that other scientists could check his results. Scien¬
tific methodology requires that a recorded reaction be repeatable by
other scientists at other locations, with an adequate number of repeti¬
tions. This made the problem more difficult than anticipated.

To begin with, Backster found that plants can quickly become so
attuned to human beings that it is not always possible to obtain exactly
the same reactions with different experimenters. Incidents such as the
fainting which occurred with the Canadian physiologist sometimes
made it look as if there were no such thing as the Backster Effect.
Personal involvement with an experiment, and even prior knowledge of
the exact time an event was scheduled, was often enough to “tip off"
a plant into noncooperation. This led Backster to the conclusion that
animals subjected to excruciating vivisection may pick up the intent of
their torturers and thus produce for them the very effects required in
order to end the ordeal as rapidly as possible. Backster found that even
if he and his colleagues discussed a project in their waiting room, the
plants, three rooms away, could be affected by the imagery apparently
generated by their conversation.

To make his point, Backster realized, he would have to devise an
experiment in which all human involvement was removed. The entire
process would have to be automated. Altogether it took Backster two
and a half years and several thousand dollars, some of it provided by the
Parapsychology Foundation, Inc., then headed by the late Eileen Gar-

12 MODERN RESEARCH

rett, to devise the right experiment and perfect the fully automated
equipment necessary to carry it out. Different scientists of varying disci¬
plines su gg ested an elaborate system of experimental controls.

The test Backster finally chose was to kill live cells by an automatic
mechanism at a random time when no humans were in or near the office,
and see if the plants reacted.

As sacrificial scapegoats Backster hit upon brine shrimp of the variety
sold as food for tropical fish. It was important to the test that the victims
demonstrate great vitality because it had been noted that tissue that is
unhealthy or has begun to die no longer acts as a remote stimulus, is no
longer capable of transmitting some type of warning. To see that brine
shrimp are in good form is easy: in a normal condition, the males spend
their whole time chasing and mounting females.

The device for “terminating” these playboy creatures consisted of a
small dish which would automatically tip them into a pot of boiling
water. A mechanical programmer actuated the device on a randomly
selected occasion so that it was impossible for Backster or his assistants
to know when the event would occur. As a control precaution against
the actual mechanism of dumping registering on the charts, dishes were
programmed at other times to dump plain water containing no brine
shrimp.

Three plants would be attached to three separate galvanometers in
three separate rooms. A fourth galvanometer was to be attached to a
fixed-value resistor to indicate possible random variations caused by
fluctuations in the power supply, or by electromagnetic disturbances
occurring near or within the experiment’s environment. Light and tem¬
perature would be kept uniform on all plants, which, as an extra precau¬
tion, would be brought from an outside source, passed through staging
areas, and hardly handled before the experiment.

Plants selected for the experiment were of the Philodendron cordatum
species because of its nice large leaves, firm enough to withstand com¬
fortably the pressure of electrodes. Different plants of the same species
would be used on successive test runs.

The scientific hypothesis which Backster wished to pursue was, prop-
er v phrased in the vernacular of science, that “there exists an as yet

Plants and ESP IS

undefined primary perception in plant life , that animat life termination
can serve as a remotely located stimulus to demonstrate this perception
capability , and that this perception facility in plants can be shown to
function independently of human involvement ’’

The experimental results showed that the plants did react strongly
and synchronously to the death of the shrimp in boiling water. The
automated monitoring system, checked by visiting scientists, showed
that plants reacted consistently to the death of the shrimp in a ratio that
was five to one against the possibility of chance.

The whole procedure of the experiment and its results were written
up in a scientific paper published in the winter of 1968 in Volume X
of The International Journal of Parapsychology under the title “Evi¬
dence of Primary Perception in Plant Life," It was now up to other
scientists to see if they could repeat Backster’s experiment and obtain
the same results.

More than seven thousand scientists asked for reprints of the report
on Backster’s original research. Students and scientists at some two
dozen American universities indicated they intended to attempt to
duplicate Backster’s experiments as soon as they could obtain the neces¬
sary equipment.* Foundations expressed interest in funding further
experiments. The news media, which at first ignored Backster’s paper,
went into a flurry of excitement over the story once National Wildlife
had the courage to take the plunge in February of 1969 with a feature
article. This attracted such worldwide attention that secretaries and
housewives began talking to their plants, and Dracaena massangeana
became a household word.

Readers seemed to be most intrigued by the thought that an oak tree
could actually quake at the approach of an axman, or that a carrot could
shiver at the sight of rabbits, while the editors of National Wildlife were
concerned that some of the applications of Backster’s phenomenon to
medical diagnosis, criminal investigation, and such fields as espionage
were so fantastic that they dared not as yet repeat them in print.

Medical World News of March 21, 1969, commented that at last

Backster has been loath to give out the names and places of these establishments so
as not to have them importuned by outsiders until they have accomplished their tests and
can make pondered announcements of their results at times of their own choosing.

14 MODERN RESEARCH

ESP research might be “on the verge of achieving the scientific respecta¬
bility that investigators of psychic phenomena have sought in vain since
1882 when the British Society for Psychical Research was founded in

Cambridge.”

William M. Bondurant, an executive of the Mary Reynolds Babcock
Foundation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, produced a grant of
$10,000 for Backster to pursue his research, commenting: “His work
indicates there may be a primary form of instantaneous communication
among all living things that transcends the physical laws we know now
_and that seems to warrant looking into.’’

Backster was thus able to invest in more expensive equipment, includ¬
ing electrocardiographs and electroencephalographs. These instruments,
normally used for measuring electrical emissions from heart and brain,
had the advantage of not putting current through the plants, merely
recording the difference in potential they discharged. The cardiograph
enabled Backster to obtain readings more sensitive than the polygraph;
the encephalograph gave him readings ten times more sensitive than the
cardiograph.

A fortuitous occurrence led Backster into another whole realm of
research. One evening, as he was about to feed a raw egg to his Dober¬
man pinscher, Backster noticed that as he cracked the egg one of his
plants attached to a polygraph reacted strenuously. The next evening he
watched again as the same thing happened. Curious to see what the egg
might be feeling, Backster attached it to a galvanometer, and was once
more up to his ears in research.

For nine hours Backster got an active chart recording from the egg,
corresponding to the rhythm of the heartbeats of the chicken embryo,
the frequency being between 160 and 170 beats per minute, appropriate
to an embryo three or four days along in incubation. Only the egg was
store-bought, acquired at the local delicatessen, and was unfertilized.
Later, breaking the egg and dissecting it, Backster was astonished to find
that it contained no physical circulatory structure of any sort to account
for the pulsation. He appeared to have tapped into some sort of force
field not conventionally understood within the present body of scientific

knowledge.

The only hint as to what sort of world he had wandered into came

Plants and ESP IS

to Backster from the amazing experiments in the energy fields around
plants, trees, humans, and even cells, carried out at the Yale Medical
School in the 1930s and 1940s by the late Professor Harold Saxton Burr,
which are only just beginning to be recognized and understood.

With these considerations Backster temporarily abandoned his ex¬
periments with plants to explore the implications of his egg discoveries,
which appeared to have profound implications for the origin-of-life
research—and are the makings of another whole book.

16 MODERN RESEARCH

CHAPTER 2

Plants Can

While Backster was developing his experiments in the eastern United
States, a heavy-set research chemist working with International Business
Machines in Los Gatos, California, was challenged to give a course in
creativity” for IBM engineers and scientists. It was only after Marcel
vogel had taken on the job that he realized the enormity of it. “How
does one define creativity?” he found himself asking. “What is a creative
Person? To answer these questions, Vogel, who had studied for years
to become a Franciscan priest, began writing an outline for twelve
two-hour seminars which he hoped would represent an ultimate chal-
en §e to his students.

1

Vogel’s own probings into the realm of creativity had started when
he was a boy, curious to know what caused the light in fireflies and
glowworms. Finding little on luminescence in the libraries, Vogel in-
formed his mother that he would write a book on the subject. Ten years
later Luminescence in Liquids and Solids and Their Practical Applica¬
tion was published by Vogel in collaboration with Chicago University’s
Dr. Peter Pringsheim. Two years after that, Vogel incorporated his own
company, called Vogel Luminescence, in San Francisco, which became
a leader in the field. Over a period of fifteen years Vogel's firm developed
a variety of new products: the red color seen on television screens;
fluorescent crayons; tags for insecticides; a “black light” inspection kit
to determine, from their urine, the secret trackways of rodents in cellars,
sewers, and slums; and the psychedelic colors popular in “new age"
posters.

By the mid-1950s Vogel became bored with his day-to-day tasks of
administering a company and sold it to go to work for IBM. There he
was able to devote his full time to research, delving into magnetics,
optic-electrical devices, and liquid crystal systems, developing and pat¬
enting inventions of crucial significance to the storage of information in
computers, and winning awards which adorn the walls of his San Jose
home.

The turning point in the creativity course which Vogel was asked to
give at IBM came when one of his students gave him an Argosy maga¬
zine with an article on Backster’s work entitled “Do Plants Have Emo¬
tions?” Vogel’s first reaction was to throw the article into the wastebas¬
ket, convinced that Backster was just another charlatan unworthy ol
serious consideration. Yet something about the idea gnawed at his mind
A few days later, Vogel retrieved the article, and completely reversed hi!
opinion.

The article, read aloud to his seminar students, aroused both derisiot

i

and curiosity. Out of this ruckus came the unanimous decision to expert
ment with plants. That same evening, one student called Vogel #
announce that the latest issue of Popular Electronics referred to Back
ster’s work, and included a wiring diagram for an instrument called*
“psychanalyser,” which would pick up and amplify reactions from plant
and could be built for less than twenty-five dollars.

18 MODERN RESEARCH

Vogel divided his class into three groups and challenged them to
repeat some of Backster’s accomplishments. By the end of the seminar,
not one of the three teams had achieved any success. Vogel, on the other
hand, was able to report that he had duplicated certain of Backster’s
results, and proceeded to demonstrate how plants anticipate the act of
having their leaves torn, react with even greater alarm to the threat of
being burnt or uprooted—more so even than if they are actually torn,
burnt, or otherwise brutalized. Vogel wondered why he alone seemed
to be successful. As a boy, he had been interested in anything which
might explain the workings of the human mind. After dipping into
books on magic, spiritualism, and hypnotic technique, he had given
stage demonstrations as a teen-age hypnotist.

What particularly fascinated Vogel were Mesmer’s theory of a univer¬
sal fluid whose equilibrium or disturbance explained health or disease,
Coup’s ideas of autosuggestion as they related to painless childbirth and
self-betterment, and the postulates of various writers on “psychic en¬
ergy/' a term popularized by Carl Jung, who, though he differentiated
it from physical energy, believed it to be incommensurable.

Vogel reasoned that, if there was a “psychic energy/' it must, like
other forms of energy, be storable. But in what? Staring at the many
chemicals on the shelves of his IBM laboratory, Vogel wondered which
of them could be used to store this energy.

In his dilemma, he asked a spiritually gifted friend, Vivian Wiley, who
went through the chemicals laid out for her and said that, in her
judgment, none offered any promise of a solution for Vogel's problem.
Vogel suggested she ignore his preconceived ideas about chemicals and
use anything which might intuitively occur to her. Back in her garden,
Vivian Wiley picked two leaves from a saxifrage, one of which she
placed on her bedside table, the other in the living room. “Each day
when I get up/’ she told Vogel, “I will look at the leaf by my bed and

that it continue to live; but I will pay no attention to the other. We
will see what happens.”

A month later, she asked Vogel to come to her house and bring a
camera to photograph the leaves. Vogel could hardly believe what he
■aw. The leaf to which his friend had paid no attention was flaccid,
bttning brown and beginning to decay. The leaf on which she had

Plants Can Read Your Mind 19

focused daily attention was radiantly vital and green, just as if it had been
freshly plucked from the garden. Some power appeared to be defying
natural law, keeping the leaf in a healthy state. Curious to see if he could 1
get the same results as his friend, Vogel picked three leaves from an elm ;

outside his IBM laboratory; at home he laid them on a plate of glass near 1
his bed. j

Each day, before breakfast, Vogel stared concentratedly at the two
outer leaves on the glass for about one minute, exhorting them lovingly 1
to continue to live; the center leaf he assiduously ignored. In a week, the
center leaf had turned brown and shriveled. The outer leaves were still '
green and heaithy-looking. Most interesting to Vogel, the severed stems
of the live leaves appeared to have healed the wounds caused by being
ripped from the tree. Vivian Wiley continued her experiments and later !
showed Vogel the saxifrage leaf which she had kept green and alive for

two long months while the control leaf was completely dehydrated and
brown. 1

Vogel was convinced that he was witnessing the power of “psychic
energy in action. If the power of the mind could keep a leaf green way
past its time, Vogel wondered what its effect might be on liquid crystals,
an intensive study of which he was pursuing for IBM.

Trained in microscopy, Vogel had taken hundreds of color slides of ,
liquid crystal behavior magnified up to three hundred times; when .
screened, they rival the works of a gifted abstract artist. While making ,
the slides, Vogel realized that, by “relaxing his mind," he could sense
activity not visually revealed in the microscopic field. j

“I began to pick up things at the microscope which eluded others, not <
with ocular vision but with my mind’s eye. After becoming aware of ]
them, says Vogel, “I was led by some form of higher sensory awareness <
to adjust the lighting conditions to allow these phenomena to be opti- j
cally recordable to the human eye or to a camera." |

The conclusion at which Vogel arrived is that crystals are brought into i
a solid, or physical, state of existence by pre-forms , or ghost images of i
pure energy which anticipate the solids. Since plants could pick up j
intentions from a human, that of burning them, for example, there was
no doubt in Vogel’s mind that intent produced some kind of energy <
field. ]

20 MODERN RESEARCH

11 By the fall of 1971, finding that his microscopic work was taking up

S ^ 0 f his time, Vogel abandoned his research on plants. But when an

article on this research quoting Dr. Gina Cerminara, psychologist and
1 author of a popular book on the seer Edgar Cayce, appeared in the San
1 Jose Mercury , and was wired by the Associated Press throughout the
world, Vogel was besieged on the telephone for information, and was
3 thus stimulated to continue.

^ Vogel realized that before he could observe with precision the effects
“ on plants of human thoughts and emotion he would have to improve
his technique of affixing electrodes to the plant leaves in such a way as
s to eliminate random electromagnetic frequencies, such as the hum of
near-by vacuum cleaners, major sources of spurious data—or engineer's
r “noise"—which could cause the pen recorder to drift on the chart, and
r which obliged Backster to conduct most of his experiments between
midnight and dawn.

Vogel also found that some of the philodendrons he worked with
responded faster, others more slowly, some very distinctly, others less
distinctly, and that not only plants but their individual leaves had their
own unique personality and individuality. Leaves with a large electrical
resistance were especially difficult to work with; fleshy leaves with a high
water content were the best. Plants appeared to go through phases of
activity and inactivity, full of response at certain times of the day or days
of the month, “sluggish" or “morose” at other times.

To make sure that none of these recording effects was the result of
faulty electroding, Vogel developed a mucilaginous substance composed
of a solution of agar, with a thickener of karri gum, and salt. This paste
he brushed onto the leaves before gently applying carefully polished
one-by-one-and-a-half-inch stainless-steel electrodes. When the agar
ielly hardened around the edges of the electronic pickups, it sealed their
races into a moist interior, virtually eliminating all the variability in
signal output caused by pressure on leaves when clamped between ordi-
nar y electrodes. This system produced for Vogel a base line on the chart
that was perfectly straight, without oscillations.

Having eliminated random influences, Vogel began a new round of
ex Penments in the spring of 1971 to see if he could establish the exact
m oment when a philodendron entered into recordable communication

Plants Can Read Your Mind 21

with a human being. With a philodendron attached to a galvanomete,

which produced a straight base line, Vogel stood before the plam

completely relaxed, breathing deeply and almost touching it with out

spread fingers. At the same time, he began to shower the plant with th t

same kind of affectionate emotion he would flow to a friend. Each tim

he did this, a series of ascending oscillations was described on the chart 1

by the pen holder. At the same time Vogel could tangibly feel, on th, 1

palms of his hands, an outpouring from the plant of some sort of energy '

After three to five minutes, further release of emotion on Vogel’s pan 1

evoked no further action from the plant, which seemed to have “di$ '

charged all its energy” in response to his ministrations. To Vogel, thf 1

interreaction between himself and the philodendron appeared to be or; ^

the same order as that evoked when lovers or close friends meet, tht *

intensity of mutual response evoking a surge of energy until it is finally

expended and must be recharged. Like lovers, both Vogel and the plant *

appeared to remain suffused with joy and contentment. ^

In a botanical nursery, Vogel found that he could easily pick out a ?

particularly sensitive plant by running his hands over a group until h< *

felt a slight cooling sensation followed by what he describes as a series *

of electrical pulses, indicating a powerful field. Increasing the distance J

between himself and the plant, Vogel found, like Backster, that he could "

get a similar reaction from it, first from outside the house, then from

down the block, and even from his laboratory in Los Gatos, eight miles r
away. *

In another experiment, Vogel wired two plants to the same recording
machine and snipped a leaf from the first plant. The second plan! „
responded to the hurt being inflicted on its neighbor, but only wher.
Vogel was paying attention to it! If Vogel cut off a leaf while ignoring p
the second plant, the response was lacking. It was as if Vogel and tht r(
plant were lovers on a park bench, oblivious of passers-by until tht q]
attention of one lover became distracted from the other.

From his own experience, Vogel knew that masters of the art of Yoga, V
and teachers of other forms of deep meditation such as Zen, are unaware w
of disturbing influences around them when in meditative states. An m
electroencephalograph picks up from them quite a different set of brais i n

22 MODERN

RESEARCH

wave $ than when the same persons are alert to the everyday world
around them. It became clearer to Vogel that a certain focused state of
consciousness on his part seemed to become an integral and balancing
part of the circuitry required to monitor his plants. A plant could be
awakened from somnolence to sensitivity by his giving up his normally
conscious state and focusing a seemingly extra-conscious part of his mind
on the exact notion that the plant be happy and feel loved, that it be
blessed with healthy growth. In this way, man and plant seemed to
interact, and, as a unit, pick up sensations from events, or third parties,
which became recordable through the plant. The process of sensitizing
both himself and the plant, Vogel found, could take only a few minutes
or up to a half hour.

Asked to describe the process in detail, Vogel said that first he quiets
the sensory responses of his body organs, then he becomes aware of an
energetic relationship between the plant and himself. When a state of

balance between the bioelectrical potential of both the plant and himself
is achieved, the plant is no longer sensitive to noise, temperature, the
normal electrical fields surrounding it, or other plants. It responds only

to Vogel, who has effectively tuned himself to it—or perhaps simply
' hypnotizes it.

Vogel now felt confident enough to accept an invitation to make a
P u ^ ic demonstration with a plant. On a local TV program in San
Francisco, the plant, coupled to a pen recorder, gave a live illustration
of varying states of Vogel’s mind, running from irritation at an inter-
viewer's questions to quiet tracings established when Vogel was in har¬
monious intercommunication with the plant. For the producer of ABC's
television program You Asked for It, Vogel also demonstrated the
£ plant s response to his or another person's thoughts, including a sudden
release of strong emotion on command, followed by the act of his
quieting the plant to normal reactions to its environment.

Invited to lecture to audiences who had heard of his experimentation,
°gel said unequivocally: “It is fact: man can and does communicate
i ^ Ptauts are living objects, sensitive, rooted in space. They

ma y blind, deaf, and dumb in the human sense, but there is no doubt
roy mind that they are extremely sensitive instruments for measuring

Plants Can Read Your Mind 23

man's emotions. They radiate energy forces that are beneficial to matt
One can fed these forces! They feed into one's own force field, whi c ]
in turn feeds back energy to the plant." The American Indians, say
Vogel, were keenly aware of these faculties. When in need, they woul
go into the woods. With their arms extended, they would place thei
backs to a pine tree in order to replenish themselves with its power.

When Vogel began to demonstrate plants’ sensitivity to “states o
attention” different from the supposed awareness which most human
like to call consciousness, he discovered that the reaction of skeptics o
hostile observers could produce strange effects on him. By paying atten
tion to negative attitudes emanating from an audience, Vogel found hi
could isolate the individuals emitting them and counter their effect v/itl
a deep breath, learned in Yoga instruction. He would then switch hi
mind to another mental image just as if he were turning a dial to;
different setting.

“The feeling of hostility, of negativity, in an audience,” says Vogel
“is one of the main barriers to effective communication. To counterad
this force is one of the most difficult tasks in public demonstration ol
these plant experiments. If one cannot do this, the plant and therefor
the equipment will ‘go dead’ and there is no response until a positiv<
"tie can be reestablished.

“It seems,” he says, “that I act as a filtering system which limits th(
response of a plant to the outside environment. I can turn it off or on
so that people and plant become mutually responsive. By charging thf
plant with some energy within me, I can cause the plant to build up i
sensitivity for this kind of work. It is extremely important that on<
understand that the plant’s response is, in my opinion, not that of ar
intelligence in plant form, but that the plant becomes an extension o
oneself. One can then interact with the bioelectric field of the plant, fl
through it, with the thought processes and emotions in a third person.’

Vogel concluded that a Life Force, or Cosmic Energy, surroundinj
all living things is sharable among plants, animals, and humans. Througl
such sharing, a person and a plant become one, “This oneness is wW
makes possible a mutual sensitivity allowing plant and man not only t(
intercommunicate, but to record these communications via the plant of
a recording chart.”

24 MODERN RESEARCH

t Because his observations indicated there was an interchange, even a
commingling or fusion of energies when plant and man commune,
! y 0 g C i w ondered whether an exceptionally sensitive individual could get
i . 0 a plant, as was reported of the sixteenth-century German mystic
i igfcob Boehme, who, as a young man, became illumined and described
being able to see in another dimension.

1 Boehme said he could look at a growing plant and suddenly, by willing
1 to do so, mingle with that plant, be part of the plant, feel its life
1 “struggling toward the light.” He said he was able to share the simple
1 ambitions of the plant and “rejoice with a joyously growing leaf.”

1 One day Vogel was visited in San Jose by Debbie Sapp, a quiet,

■ self-effacing girl who impressed Vogel with her initial ability to enter
; into instant rapport with his philodendron, as established by his in¬
strumentation.

When the plant was entirely calm, he asked her, point blank: “Can
you get into that plant?” Debbie nodded assent, and her face took on
an attitude of quiet repose, of detachment, as if she were far away in
another universe. Immediately the recording pen began to trace a pat¬
tern of undulations revealing to Vogel that the plant was receiving an
unusual amount of energy.

Debbie later described what happened in writing:

Mr. Vogel asked me to relax and project myself into the philodendron.
Several things took place as I began to carry out his request.

First, I wondered exactly how I could get inside a plant. I made a
conscious decision to let my imagination take over and found myself
entering the main stem through a doorway at its base. Once inside, I saw
the moving cells and water traveling upward through the stem, and let
myself move with this upward flow.

Approaching the spreading leaves in my imagination, I could feel
myself being drawn from an imaginary world into a realm over which I
had no control. There were no mental pictures, but rather a feeling that
I was becoming part of, and filling out, a broad expansive surface. This
seemed to me to be describable only as pure consciousness.

I felt acceptance and positive protection by the plant. There was no
sense of time, just a feeling of unity in existence and in space. I smiled
spontaneously and let myself be one with the plant.

Then Mr. Vogel asked me to relax. When he said this, I realized 1 was
very tired but peaceful. All of my energy had been with the plant,

Plants Can Read Your Mind 25

Vogel, who was observing the recording on the chart, noticed an
abrupt stop when the girl “came out” of the plant. On later occasions,
when the girl “re-entered” the plant, she was able to describe the inner
makeup of its cells and their structure in detail. She specifically noted
that one of the leaves had been badly burned by an electrode. When
Vogel detached the electrode, he found a hole almost all the way
through the leaf.

Vogel has since tried the same experiment with dozens of other
people, having them go into a single leaf and look at the individual cells
within it. All gave consistent descriptions of various parts of the cellular
body down to the detailed organization of the DNA molecules. From
the experiment, Vogel came to the conclusion: “We can move into
individual cells in our own bodies and, depending on our state of mind,
affect them in various ways. One day, this may explain the cause of
disease.”

The ability to go into a plant and analyze what part of it is hurt was
demonstrated on TV film on Good Friday, 1973, when Vogel and Dr.
Tom Montelbono, who had been working with him for over a year, were
filmed during plant experimentation by a TV production team from
CBS. It was highly embarrassing to both researchers that the plant
seemed not to respond. Vogel asked Montelbono to see if there was
something wrong with the electroding. Instead of tampering with the
electrodes, Montelbono, to the astonishment of the CBS technicians,
sat where he was and after a moment's concentration announced that
damaged cells in the upper right-hand corner of the electroded part of
the leaf were shorting the electrical circuit. In the presence of the TV
men the electrodes were removed and the leaf was found to be damaged
exactly where Montelbono had said.

Because Vogel knows that, among all humans, children are the most
“open-minded,” he has begun to teach children how to interact with
plants. First, he asks them to feel a leaf, describe its temperature,
consistency, and texture in detail. Next, he lets them bend leaves and
become aware of their resilience before going on to pet the leaves gently
by stroking their upper and under sides. If his pupils take pleasure if
describing to him the sensations they feel, Vogel asks them to take their

26 MODERN RESEARCH

hands away from the leaves and try to feel a force or energy emanating
from them. Many of the children instantly described a rippling or
tingling sensation.

Vogel noticed that those children who felt the strongest sensations
were wholly engrossed in what they were doing. Once they felt the
tjngling, he would say: “Now completely relax and feel the give-and-take
of the energy. When you feel it pulsing, gently move your hand up and
down over the leaf ” Following his directions, the young experimenters
could easily see that, when they brought their hands down, the leaves
fell away. By continued repetition of this motion, the leaves would begin
to oscillate. With the use of both hands, the experimenters could actu¬
ally get a plant to sway. As they gained confidence, Vogel urged them
to move further and further away from the plant.

“This is basic training,” says Vogel, “to develop an expanded aware-
mess of a force which is not visible. The awareness established, they see
they can operate with this force.”

Adults, according to Vogel, are much less successful than children,
which leads him to surmise that many scientists are not going to be able
to repeat his or Backster’s experiments in laboratories. “If they approach
the experimentation in a mechanistic way,” says Vogel, “and don’t enter
into mutual communication with their plants and treat them as friends,
they will fail. It is essential to have an open mind that eliminates all
preconceptions before beginning experiments.” Indeed, Vogel was told
by one doctor working at the California Psychical Society that he had
had not a single result, though he had worked for months. The same is
true for one of Denver’s most renowned psychoanalysts.

“Hundreds of laboratory workers around the world,” says Vogel, “are
going to be just as frustrated and disappointed as these men until they
appreciate that the empathy between plant and human is the key, and
learn how to establish it. No amount of checking in laboratories is going
m prove a thing until the experiments are done by properly trained
observers. Spiritual development is indispensable. But this runs counter
to the philosophy of many scientists, who do not realize that creative
^Perimentation means that the experimenters must become part of their

experiments. ”

Plants Can Read Your Mind 27

This highlights the difference in approach between Vogel and
Backster, indicating, perhaps, that Vogel is establishing a type of hyp.
notic control over his plants, whereas Backster says that his plants, left
strictly alone, will quite normally react to their environment.

Vogel says that even when a person can affect a plant, the result i$
not always a happy one. He asked one of his friends, a clinical psycholo
gist, who had come to see for himself if there was any truth to the plant
research, to project a strong emotion to a philodendron fifteen feet away.
The plant surged into an instantaneous and intense reaction and then,
suddenly, “went dead.” When Vogel asked the psychologist what had
gone through his mind, the man answered that he had mentally com¬
pared Vogel’s plant with his own philodendron at home, and thought
how inferior Vogel’s was to his. The “feelings” of Vogel’s plant were
evidently so badly hurt that it refused to respond for the rest of the day;
in fact, it sulked for almost two weeks. Vogel could not doubt that plants
have a definite aversion to certain humans, or, more exactly, to what
those humans are thinking.

This being true, Vogel considered it possible, one day, to read a
person’s thoughts through a plant. Something of the sort had already
taken place. Vogel had asked a nuclear physicist to mentally “work” on
a technical problem. As the man was cogitating, Vogel’s plant registered
a series of tracings on the recorder for 118 seconds, When the tracing
fell back to base line, Vogel informed his scientist friend that he had
stopped his train of thought. The friend corroborated.

Vogel wondered if he had actually captured a process on a chart via
a plant. After a few minutes, he asked the physicist to think of his wife.
When the physicist did so, the plant again recorded a tracing, this time
for 105 seconds. It seemed to Vogel that, right before him in his living
room, a plant was picking up and passing on a man’s mental impressions
of his wife. If one could interpret such tracings, could one not know
what the man was thinking?

After a break for a cup of coffee, Vogel almost casually asked his friend
to think once more of his wife in the same way he had thought of her
before. The plant registered another 105-second-long tracing very simi¬
lar to the first. To Vogel this was the first time a plant seemed to have
recorded a similar thought spectrogram and duplicated it.

28 MODERN RESEARCH

“By pursuing such experiments,” says Vogel, “we may have a means
r technically identifying energies coming from the human mind, trans¬
lating them, and feeding them back into an as yet undeveloped device.
A whole evening of thinking may be made explicit.”

Entertaining a group of skeptical psychologists, medical doctors, and
computer programmers at his house, Vogel let them look over his equip¬
ment for hidden devices and gimmicks which they insisted must exist,
then asked them to sit in a circle and talk so as to see what reactions
the plant might pick up. For an hour the group conversed on several
topics with hardly a response from the plant. Just as they had all con¬
cluded that the whole thing was a fake, one of them said: “How about
sex?” To their mutual surprise, the plant came to life, the pen recorder
oscillating wildly on the chart. This led to speculation that talking of sex
could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy such as the
“orgone” discovered and described by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and that the
ancient fertility rites in which humans had sexual intercourse in freshly
seeded fields might indeed have stimulated plants to grow.

The plant also responded to spooky stories told in a darkened room
lit only by a red-shaded candle. At certain points in a story, such as: “The

door of the mysterious cabin in the forest began slowly to open,” or,
“Suddenly there appeared around the corner a strange man with a knife
in his hand,” or “Charles bent down and raised the lid of the coffin,”
the plant seemed to pay closer attention. To Vogel, this was evidence
that a plant can measure “figments of the imagination,” being converted
to energy by the group as a whole.

Dr. Hal Puthoff, a physicist at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo
Alto, invited Vogel and five other scientists to witness the effects he was
getting by hooking up a chicken egg to the electro-psychometer, or
E-meter,” developed by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
The E-meter’s function is almost identical to that of the psychoanalyzer
which Vogel had first used with his seminar students. Puthoff attempted
to demonstrate that the egg wired to the E-meter would respond when
another egg was broken. He broke three separate eggs, but nothing
happened. After asking Puthoff if he could try, Vogel put his hand over
an egg and related to it exactly as he had learned to relate to his plants.
In one minute, the needle on the E-meter’s galvanometer dial began to

Plants Car Read Your Mind 29

move and finally “pinned." Vogel backed ten feet away and got gyra¬
tions from the needle by opening and closing his hands. Though Puthoff
and several others present tried to do the same, all failed.

The needle’s movement, once thought to be affected by resistance on
the skin of humans attached to electrodes, is known as Galvanic Skin
Response, or GSR. Since plants have no skin, in the human sense, the
term for the effect on plants has been changed to Psycho-Galvanic

Response, or PGR

“The PGR,” says Vogel, “exists not only in plants, but in all living
forms. The directive action of the mind focuses this energy and, on
command, releases the force in a series of pulses which can pass through

glass, metals, and other materials. No one yet knows exactly what they

11

are.

In Russia, a psychic called Nina Kulagina can turn the needle of a
compass without touching it but she has to do it with her hands near
the compass; more impressive feats have been demonstrated at Stanford
University, especially by the remarkably sensitive Ingo Swann, who
attributes his success to techniques he learned in Scientology. With
nothing but his will power, Swann has been able to affect a mechanism
in the university’s most thoroughly shielded quark chamber, buried
' deep underground in a vault of liquid helium, impenetrable to any
known wave length of the electromagnetic spectrum, astonishing the
academic physicists who watched him perform what they considered to

be an impossible feat.

Vogel stresses that experiments with plants can be extremely danger¬
ous to those who do not have the ability properly to alter their states of
consciousness. “Focused thought, says Vogel, can exert a tremendous
effect on the body of a person in a higher mental state, if he lets his

emotions interfere,”

No one, says Vogel, who is not in sound bodily health should become
involved with plants or any other kind of psychic research. Though he
has not been able to prove it, Vogel feels that a special diet of vegetables,
fruits, and nuts, rich in minerals and proteins, allows the body to build
the kind of energy necessary for such work. “One draws energy at higl 1
levels,” he said, “and this requires good nutrition.”

30 MODERN RESEARCH

Asked how the higher energies, such as thought, might operate on the
physical bodies of living organisms, Vogel says he has now begun to
speculate on the strange properties of water. As a crystallographer, he
is interested in the fact that, unlike most salts, which have one crystalline
form, core samples of glacier ice have more than thirty different forms.
“Uninitiated persons, when first looking at them,” says Vogel, “could
conclude that they were observing as many different substances. And
they would be right in their own way because water is a real mystery.”

Vogel makes the prediction, which he stresses is as yet far from
established fact, that since living things all have a high water content,
the vitality of a person must be in some way related to the rate of
respiration. As water moves around the body and through its pores,
charges are built. Vogel's first clue about his postulate on water came
from the fact that some “psychics” have lost several pounds of body
weight during sessions in which they expended vital, or psychic, energy.
“If we could weigh a person doing psychic research on a sensitive scale,”
suggests Vogel, “we would find that there is a loss of weight in each case.
It is a water loss, as it is in persons who go on crash diets.”

Whatever the future brings, Vogel believes that his research with
plants can help man to the recognition of long-ignored truths. By devel¬
oping simple training kits, which he is presently designing, he thinks he
can teach children to release their emotions and watch the effects in a
measurable way.

"“They can thus learn the art of loving , ” says Vogel, “and know truly
that when they think a thought they release a tremendous power or force
in space. By knowing that they are their thoughts, they will know how
to use thinking to achieve spiritual, emotional, and intellectual growth.

This is no machine to measure brain waves or any gimmick to help
People to become seers or mystics,” Vogel insists, “but one to help
children to become simple , honest human beings. ”

Asked to sum up the importance of his research with plants, Vogel
replied: “So much of the ills and suffering in life comes from our
inability to release stresses and forces within us. When a person rejects
us > we rebel inside and we hold on to this rejection. This builds a stress
w hich, as Dr. Wilhelm Reich showed so long ago, becomes locked in

Plants Can Read Your Mind 31

as muscular tension, and if not unlocked, depletes the body’s energy field
and alters its chemistry. My research with plants indicates one pathway

to deliverance.”

For Marcel Vogel, plants have opened new horizons. The vegetal
kingdom seems capable of picking up messages of intent, benign or
malicious, that are inherently more truthful than when translated into
words—a talent which all human beings may share but which they have

momentarily occluded.

Two young Californian students of humanistic psychology and Hindu
philosophy, Randall Fontes and Robert Swanson, have now pursued
Vogel’s quarry into unbeaten ground. Using sophisticated equipment
lent them by the IBM researcher, they have made a senes of discoveries
so surprising that despite their youth they have been granted funds and
equipment by established universities to further probe the mysteries of

plant communication.

Fontes’ and Swanson’s first discovery came virtually by accident when
one noticed that the other’s yawning was being picked up by a plant m
the form of energy surges. Instead of ignoring the phenomenon as
improbable, the two students followed up the clue remembering that m
ancient Hindu texts an exaggerated yawn was considered a means by
'which a tired person could be recharged with vivifying shakhti, a postu¬
lated energy filling the universe.

With the help of Dr. Norman Goldstein, a professor of biology at
State University in Hayward, California, Fontes went on to discover an
electrical potential traveling from cell to cell in the ivy philodendron
which gives a strong indication of the presence of a hitherto unsuspected
simple nervous system. As a result, Fontes has been invited to direct a
project at the Science Unlimited Research Foundation in San Antonio,
Texas, on the effects of human consciousness on living organisms. Mean¬
while, Swanson is cooperating in the setting up of a parapsychologically
oriented counseling center at the John F. Kennedy University in Mar¬
tinez, California, where one of Swanson’s goals is to determine just
which people affect plants telepathically and which do not.

32 MODERN RESEARCH

CHAPTER 3

Plants That Open Doors

Next to probe the mysteries of plant communication was an “electronics
specialist" from West Paterson, New Jersey, who happened to hear
Baclcster interviewed on a radio program hosted by Long John Nebel.
An assiduous investigator of ESP and of the phenomenon of remote
hypnotism, Pierre Paul Sauvin was equally at home in the “state of the
. and “feasibility considerations” of the engineer, mostly because of
his training and employment for several large corporations, including
Aerospace and International Telephone and Telegraph.

Long John—a professional skeptic—roped Backster into a
COrner to get him to describe some practical uses for his discovery of

r

primary perception in plants, Backster first suggested the exotic notion
that in |ungle warfare soldiers in dangerous territory could wire up the
local plants to act as “stress alarm indicators” and avoid being am-
bushed. “But if you really want to make a psychologist sit up and take
notice,” Backster told Long John, “you could instrument a plant to
activate a small electric train, getting it to move back and forth on no
other command than that of human emotion.

This notion, though singularly impractical, could be spelled out in
Sauvin’s electronics jargon as an “anxiety response device,” and so fired
him that he turned his bachelor quarters in a house overlooking the
Passaic River into a Merlin’s cave of electronic equipment.

Sauvin claims that many of his insights and ideas for inventions come
to him in psychic flashes, as if he were merely acting as a medium. He
says he sometimes gets the factual data necessary for an invention
without fully understanding the principle, or how it relates to the whole,
and must get further details by questions addressed to levels beyond.

Using high-voltage generators which produce the sort of lightning
arcs usually associated with Dr. Frankenstein, Sauvin can put 27,001]
volts through his body and remotely activate a large doughnut bulb filled
with helium to serve as an electronic ouija board, its dark rings flowing
' in one direction or the other in answer to his questions. He also devel
oped a system guaranteed to hypnotize anyone, even the most recalci
trant, by placing the subject on an unstable platform in a pitch-blacl
room and swaying before him a rainbow pattern of light that causes him

to lose his balance.

With such exotic expertise it was not long before Sauvin had a to;
electric train running round a track and reversing its direction througl
nothing but his thought and emotion relayed to a plant. He was abit
not only successfully to demonstrate the phenomenon before an audi
ence of sixty in Madison, New Jersey, but to make the train start afli

stop at will under the klieg lights of a television studio.

As the engine moved around the track it would activate a switd
leading to Sauvin’s body in such a way as to give him a sharp elects
shock. Just ahead on the track, another switch was wired to a galvanorn £
ter attached to an ordinary philodendron. As the philodendron picke

34 MODERN RESEARCH

up Sauvin's emotional reaction at being shocked, the galvanometer
needle would jump and throw the switch, reversing the train. The next
step was for Sauvin simply to remember the sensation of being shocked
and project it in order for the plant to activate the switch.

Though Sauvin had long been interested in parapsychology and was
fascinated with the psychological implications of a plant responding to
human thought and emotion, his main preoccupation was the develop¬
ment of a foolproof plant device that could be activated by any human
being. For Sauvin’s purposes it did not matter whether the plant was in
any way rational or feeling, so long as it could reliably pick up his
emotional signal and trigger the switch. Whether plants were “con¬
scious'" or not, Sauvin was convinced they had an energy field similar
to the energy field generated by a human being, and that somehow an
interaction of these fields could be put to use. The problem was to
develop equipment sensitive enough to take advantage of the phenome¬
non in an absolutely reliable way,

Perusing the endless stream of trade journals that passed across his
desk as a technical writer for ITT, Sauvin was struck by a series of articles
in Popular Electronics, on unusual electronic circuits and exotic weap¬
onry, by a mysterious writer named L. George Lawrence. The author,
intrigued by the Russian development of animal guidance systems for
training cats to pilot nonjammable air-to-air missiles right onto target,
speculated in his articles on training plants to respond to the presence
of selected objects and images, evidently for a similar purpose. Rumored
to be a high government official involved in security research writing
under a pseudonym, Lawrence is in fact a European-born engineer,
formerly a professor of audio-visual arts at San Bernardino College in

California, presently the director of his own independent research insti¬
tute.

unfortunately, the components for sophisticated circuits such as

°se devised by Lawrence—though worth mere pennies, in terms of
materials—would cost thousands of dollars of engineering man-hours to
Produce, and were in any case not available on the market. But from one
0 Sauvin's jobs as a specifications engineer on a large government
extract he had salvaged what might be just the right pieces—some

i.

Plants That Open Doors 35

phase-looplocked discriminators pressed into microelectronic silicon w* (
fers that had been junked by the lab as unfit for the temperate ;

requirements of space. ,

With these “chips” Sauvin was able to build a Wheatstone bridge fot ,

measuring electrical potential with alternating instead of direct current^ (
and an automatic gain control circuit by means of which he hoped tt (
be able to distinguish very fine changes in the energy fields of plants <
The sensitivity achieved was one hundred times greater than could h ,
obtained with Backster’s galvanometer and eliminated enormou ;

amounts of electronic “noise.” 1

What Sauvin was now measuring was no longer voltage amplitude bul |
phase shift, or the fine lag between two running voltages. The result gavt
Sauvin an instrument roughly comparable to an ordinary light-dimmei <
switch, in which a plant leaf acted as the switch. Variations of appared 1
resistance in the leaf would cause a light to get brighter or dim me i
depending on the response of the plant to outside effects. 1

As soon as his device was functioning, Sauvin set about monitorin[ i
plants around the clock. To catch the tiniest nuances of phase shif
Sauvin hooked his plants to an oscilloscope, a big electronic green eyi 1
with a figure eight of light whose loops changed shape as the curren i
from a plant varied, making patterns much like the fluttering of thi i
wings of a butterfly. Simultaneously, a varying tone was produced b; i
current run through an amplified tone oscillator which enabled Sauvir ]
to hear minute changes in vibrations, and know how his plants wen
reacting. A bank of tape recorders kept a permanent record of thi
oscillating tone, along with a monotonous beep every second from i 1
WWV international time-signal broadcast. With a stopwatch Sauvii 1
could run a check on the effect he was having on his plants from i‘
distance, whether down the street, at ITT, or off on a holiday.

Some of Sauvin’s Merlin equipment now came into its own, especial!
a complex system of automatic phone-answering and recording device!
For some years Sauvin had been carrying on a moonlighting operation
writing for various specialized magazines, under various pseudonym
while retaining his regular job. To keep his cover and not arouse tfo
displeasure of his masters at ITT and yet be able to consult with hi
editors and answer their queries any time during the day, Sauvin

36 MODERN RESEARCH

jgvised an ingenious system. By means of a small radio transmitter
tapped to his leg and a battery of automated and preprogrammed tape

chines at home he could communicate via his home phone, receiving
messages and giving answers, all from his desk at ITT. For various
editors to identify themselves to Sauvin’s automatic equipment he devel¬
oped such simple tricks as having an editor run his finger along a pocket
comb close to the phone mouthpiece, generating an easily identifiable
sound wave which would trigger from the automatic equipment the
appropriate reply. As a cover for his own low-toned conversations from
his desk, Sauvin developed the habit of humming to himself most of the
time he was at work, soon becoming known as the “hummer" of ITT.

This Rube Goldberg equipment served Sauvin admirably for remote-
controlled communication with his plants. He could call his own num¬
ber and speak to his plants directly; he could monitor the tones of their
response via the amplified audio-oscillator, and from wherever he might
be he could control the light, color, temperature, or recording equip¬
ment in his quarters.

When electroding his plants Sauvin gradually realized that like Vogel
he could obtain the best results from plants with which he established
a special mental rapport. This he would accomplish by putting himself
into a light trance, wishing the plant well, tenderly touching or washing
its leaves, till he could feel his own energy emanations entering and
interplaying with those of the plant.

Like Backster, Sauvin found that his plants reacted most strongly to
the death of living cells in their environment, and most consistently to
the death of human cells. He also found in the course of his various
experiments that the simplest signal he could transmit to his plants,
cxtrasensorily, to which they would respond with a sharp enough reac¬
tion, was to give himself a light electric shock, the very simplest method
being to swivel his desk chair and then ground the accumulated static
charge by touching his finger to his metal desk. His plants several miles
away would react with an instant surge. Just as with the train experi-
luent, Sauvin eventually found that he merely needed to remember or
re *feel a shock for his plants to pick up the signal, even from as far away
as his holiday cottage eighty miles north of his West Paterson lab.

As Sauvin’s main problem remained that of getting his plants to be

Plants That Open Doors 37

I.

sharply attuned to his person rather than to their immediate envirot
ment, when he was away for several days, he had to devise some meat
of attracting his plants’ attention even more effectively than addressin
them over the long-distance phone. As his plants reacted most strong)
to any damage done to himself or to any part of his own energy fie) (
he experimented with remotely killing a few cells of his body in t\
presence of the plants. The system worked admirably. The problem ws
to obtain cells that would remain alive for protracted periods. Bloo
worked well enough, hair was difficult to kill, but sperm worked best c
all, because, as Sauvin explained, it was easier to obtain than bleeding
and much less painful.

These experiments led Sauvin to wonder if plants might not react ju
as well to emotions of pleasure and joy as to pain and shock. Not onl
was he tired of shocking himself, he was afraid that repeated shocks I
his plants, even indirect ones, might be unpleasantly loading his karm

Sauvin soon found that his plants did react to joy and pleasure, but wit 1
wave patterns that were not sharp enough to trigger a switch reliahl
Undaunted, Sauvin decided on a more daring experiment. During £
holiday with a girl friend at his lakeside cottage he established that 1

£

plants, eighty miles away, would react with very high peaks on the ton
oscillator to the acute pleasure of sexual climax, going right off the to
at the moment of orgasm. All of which was very interesting and coul ^
be turned into a commercially marketable device for jealous wives t

monitor their philandering husbands, by means of a potted begonia. Bi
it was not yet conducive to a simple, foolproof system of getting a plai
to trigger a switch consistently.

There was no question in Sauvin’s mind that he could affect a plai
at a distance; but he could not rely on the system for any really sensito
fail-safe purpose because his plant might at any time react to son
stimulus in its own environment, such as the sudden appearance of a c
or of a bird outside the window snapping up an insect. Sauvin thereto
wired three plants, each set in a different room, and thus in a differet

environment, to a single circuit which could only be activated if all thrf

plants reacted synchronously. By keeping the plants in separate envirdo
ments Sauvin hoped the required stimulus would be synchronous on

38 MODERN RESEARCH

ro t when it came from him, wherever he might be. This was still not
ia 5 positively foolproof, because at times one plant or the other might not
sii, fully react to the stimulus, but it was a step forward in that it prevented
id any random stimulus from affecting all three plants at once.
e [. Sauvin was now anxious to release his data confirming Backs ter’s
{I fin dings and to make public his own contribution to a science which he
% felt had a potential for the world no less great than Marconi's use of
oq radio waves. But in a country where government and industrial execu-
t tives are less interested in the quaint notion of communing with nature
than in developing sophisticated weapons of offense and the gadgetry
of mind surveillance, Sauvin had a hard time finding either a sponsor
■, or an audience.

)nl Unable to interest the mass media, or such conservative journals as
s ( Science or Scientific American , Sauvin decided to angle his material to
m the engineering and mechanical journals to which he was already a
regular contributor. To incite the interest of the editor of a car magazine
w he concocted a story about a device that would enable him to start his
g car by remote control by means of thought waves to a plant. With the
t he *P a sma11 ra dio transmitter this proved to be a simple enough
uii operation, the only technical difficulty being the designing of a gadget
to that would give just the right pressure to the ignition key, repeat the
, pressure if the engine failed to catch, and release pressure the moment

, it did.

Bi device was designed to appeal to a citizen with the prospect of

ai e ‘ n ® a ^ e t0 wa ^ e U P on a frosty morning and get his car and heater
started while still comfortably enjoying his breakfast. But for Sauvin

a l “ ere was one defect: a plant was not really needed; the device could be
■it operated directly by radio, To include his beloved plants in a worthwhile
n a ttractive to automobile and home owners, Sauvin cooked up a
^ system whereby a man returning on a snowy night could approach his
o; garage and signal his pet philodendron to open the doors. Here the
Ptant’s function of responding only to its master would make it admira-

r( bl y burglar-proof,

1 T

°'Sa arOUSC the interest of serious scientists who might wish to provide
n uvin with the necessary funds for a proper lab, Sauvin hit upon the

Plants That Open Doors 39

V

idea of showing that an airplane could be flown by thought control wi[j
the aid of his plants attached to his sensitive devices. For years Sauvi*
already a licensed pilot, had enjoyed the hobby of flying model planq
some with a wing spread as large as six feet, controlling them entire!
from the ground by radio signals, getting them to bank, loop, speed up
stow down, and even land. By a slight adaptation to his transmit
equipment Sauvin is able to start, stop, or affect the speed of a mod{
plane in flight by transmitting a thought to a plant.

In the sensitivity of plants Sauvin also saw a means of detecting
potential hijacker at an airport before such a criminal could board
plane and endanger passengers. He therefore suggested "Operation Slo
jack, 1 ' a system whereby plants could be used in conjunction with galv;
nometers and other sensitive devices to pick up the turbulent emotion
of a hijacker being screened by security, the problem at an airport bein
to safeguard not only the lives of passengers but their rights as citizen

not to be subjected to unwarranted search.

Already the U.S, Army has taken an interest in the project. At Foi
Belvoir, Virginia, funds have been provided for research on plants. Tt
Army is interested in devising ways of measuring the emotional n
sponses of people via plants, without having to sensitize the plants t
a special person beforehand.

The Navy is also showing interest. Eldon Byrd, an operations anaty
with the Advanced Planning and Analysis Staff of the Naval Ordnam
Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland, has been duplicating Backstei
experiments with some success. A member of the American Society f
Cybernetics and senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Ele
tronic Engineers, Byrd attached the electrodes of a polygraph to tl
leaves of a plant, and has been observing definite fluctuations of tl
polygraph needle as the plant responds to various stimuli. Like Backstf
Byrd found that by merely thinking of harming a plant’s leaf it im¬
possible to make the polygraph needle jump. Byrd’s experiments i
volved monitoring a plant s reaction to stimuli from water, infrared 3J
ultraviolet light, fire, physical stress, and dismemberment.

Byrd believes the galvanometrical effect produced by a plant is si
caused by electrical resistance in the leaf, but by a change of b

40 MODERN RESEARCH

potential in the cells from outside to the inside membrane, as defined
by the Swedish Dr. L. Karlson, who has shown that a cluster of cells can
change polarity, though the energy which causes cells to become polar¬
ized is n °t known. Byrd believes that a voltage change in the cells is what
is being measured, and that it is the mechanism of consciousness which
causes the change in potential.

Byrd's research supports Backster’s observations that plants exhibit a
quality of awareness and an empathy to other organisms that are stimu¬
lated in their presence. Like Backster, Byrd also found a major problem
in his experiments to be the plants’ tendency to “faint” under excess
stress, suddenly ceasing to respond even to the most basic stimuli, such
as light and heat. Like Backster and Sauvin, Byrd was able to demon¬
strate on television a plant's reaction to various stimuli, including his
intent to burn it. On camera Byrd got a plant to respond to his shaking
a spider in a pill box. The plant responded with about a second's delay,
the response continuing as long as a minute. He also got a strong
reaction when cutting the leaf from another plant.

Byrd, who has a master’s degree in medical engineering from George
Washington University and is a member of Mensa, a worldwide organi¬
zation whose primary requirement is an extremely high intelligence
quotient, has no ready solution to explain the apparent response of plants
to human thoughts, and is open to widely disparate explanations, includ¬
ing alterations of the earth's magnetic field, supernatural and spiritual
phenomena, and the mysterious mechanics of bioplasma. In a paper

fi presented in 1972 to the American Society of Cybernetics, Byrd re¬
el viewed numerous Russian experiments with thought transmission via
[ “bioplasma,” which certain Soviet scientists claim to be a previously
1 undiscovered form of energy.

:( m May, 1973, Byrd began to set up an experiment to instrument the
?. bny leaves of Mimosa pudica , which are so sensitive that they collapse
i when touched. Byrd believes that, by using a thin wire barely touching
it a mimosa leaf, he can pick up through a special amplifier minute changes
m voltage or resistance. Also available to Byrd is one of the world’s finest
n recorders, made in West Germany by Siemens, which shoots out
)i 111016 than three feet of recording paper per second with the patterns

Plants That Open Doors 41

I II: I II'

i i.lili .

!l li! ■

I 1 ll j

I '■

i :ii.

' mJ ,= ■

i i i : ii

:lll

.I' /ilill

.-'.I'

j , 1 . :i :

'r 1 .1

! I ! ! ;l' ■'

Mi: ll ,

I 1 ■ ' :

1 1 1 ■ I
I ' I- : :

I ll I
: i II 1 I J 11

' I
■' I

recorded by a jet of ink only a few microns wide. With these device*
Byrd hopes to be able to pick up plant reactions which have hitherto

gone unnoticed.

Byrd is also planning to work with a primitive marine alga, Acetabu.
laria cremulata, which, though two inches long, is made up of only a
single cell. If this monocellular plant exhibits the Backster Effect,
Byrd will then surgically remove its nucleus. If it then fails to respond,
Byrd hopes this will offer proof that the genetic material in the nuclei
of plant cells is chiefly responsible for plant response.

A revolutionary new lie-detector device known as a Psychological
Stress Evaluator has also been made available to Byrd, along with lab
space and facilities, by Allan Bell, inventor of the device, who is presi¬
dent of Dektor Counter Intelligence Systems, a firm he recently formed
with two other ex-intelligence officers. The device, tested by monitoring
twenty-five segments of the television program To Tell the Truth, is said
to have picked the persons who were telling the truth with 94.7 percent
accuracy. The theory behind the device is that the human voice nor¬
mally operates in both audible frequencies and inaudible frequency
modulations, except when a person is under stress. According to the
inventors of the device, when the inaudible FM vibrations disappear
from the voice under stress, the ear does not note the difference, but
the machine can trace the fluctuations on a chart. Byrd is now working
on a means of adapting the device for employment in conjunction with

plants.

In Japan a soft-spoken doctor of philosophy and successful electronics
engineer from Kamakura, a charmingly gardened retreat not far from
Yokohama harbor, has developed a similar lie detector into a device with
the most fabulous results yet achieved in the plant kingdom. A regular
consultant on lie detection for the Japanese police, Dr. Ken Hashimoto
read about Backster s laboratory experiments and decided to wire one
of the family cactuses to an ordinary polygraph by means of acupuncture

needles.

His intent was more revolutionary than Backster s, Sauvin s or Byrd $.
He hoped to enter into actual conversation with a plant; to do so he
counted on an improvement he had made in the Japanese procedure foi

MODERN RESEARCH

lie detection. To simplify and make less expensive the process of police
interrogation. Dr. Hashimoto developed a system, similar to Dektor’s,
whereby nothing more than a cassette tape is needed to record the
reactions of a suspect. Electronically transposing the modulations of the
suspect’s voice, Hashimoto was able to produce on a paper a running
graph reliable enough to pass muster in a Japanese law court.

It now dawned on Hashimoto that by reversing the system he might
be able to transform the tracings from a graph into modulated sounds,
giving voice to a plant. His first experiments with a cactus similar to the
giant saguaro of California and the Arizona desert, but much smaller,
were a failure. Loath to conclude that either Backster’s reports or his
own equipment was defective, Hashimoto decided that it might be he
who was having trouble communicating with the plant, despite the fact
that he is one of Japan’s leading researchers into psychic phenomena.

His wife, on the other hand, who loves plants and is renowned for her
“green thumb,” soon got sensational results. As Mrs. Hashimoto assured
the plant that she loved it, there was an instant response from the cactus.
Transformed and amplified by Dr. Hashimoto’s electronic equipment,
the sound produced by the plant was like the high-pitched hum of
very-high-voltage wires heard from a distance, except that it was more
like a song, the rhythm and tone being varied and pleasant, at times even
warm and almost jolly.

John Francis Dougherty, a young American from Marina Del Rey,
California, who witnessed one of these conversations, says it sounded as
if Mrs. Hashimoto, speaking in modulated Japanese, was being answered
by the plant in modulated “cactese.” Dougherty further reports that the
Hashimotos became so intimate with their plant that they were soon
able to teach it to count and add up to twenty. In answer to a query as
to how much two and two make, the plant would respond with sounds
which, when transcribed back into inked tracings, produced four distinct
and conjoined peaks.

Dr. Hashimoto, who got his doctorate from Tokyo University, and is
chief of the Hashimoto Electronics Research Center, as well as manag-
m § director and chief of research for the Fuji Electronic Industries—
which produce the huge animated electrical signs that illumine Tokyo

Plants That Open Doors 43

II!
i ! 1 j
, I :

■ l!i

—has since demonstrated the adding capacities of his cactus to audi-
ences all over Japan.

Asked to explain the phenomenon of his talking and adding cactus,
Dr. Hashimoto, who is also, surprisingly, one of Japan’s best-selling
authors—his Introduction to ESP is in its sixtieth printing and his

H

Mystery of the Fourth Dimensional World is in its eightieth—answered
that there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by the theories
of present-day physics. He believes there is a world beyond the present
three-dimensional world defined by physics, that this three-dimensional
world is merely a shadow of a fourth-dimensional, nonmaterial world. He
further believes that this fourth-dimensional world controls the three-
dimensional material world through what he calls “mind concentration”
or what others call psychokinesis, or mind-over-matter.

The possibilities of such mind control being used for either good or
evil on this planet is the problem now facing these researchers. Since
Sauvin’s ordination as a minister at the Psychic Science Temple of
Metaphysics, he has become a strong pacifist, abhorrent of the use of
thought-controlled weapons against animals and plants as well as hu¬
mans. Though he has taken out business certificates on such devices—
which put him on record as the inventor—he is loath to disclose his most
sensitive invention, code-named Device 13, for fear that it could quickly
be developed by the Department of Defense into a foolproof thought-
controlled guided missile. The temple’s spiritual leader, the Reverend R
William Daut, is a trumpet medium, one who communicates with
those who have departed by going into trance and having a trumpet
levitate in a semidarkened room; through it the voices of the departed
speak. Made of three pieces of aluminum in the shape of a cheerleader's
megaphone, the trumpet has no electronic or other gimmicks. The
voices simply seem to materialize out of thin air, at times recognizable
as individuals known to the listeners and at others as guiding spirits;
often included are such extraneous sound effects as the distant barking
of dogs.

Sauvin says the purpose of the exercise is to convey enlightenment
to give profound and beautiful inspirational messages on wisdom, love
and the continuity of life. True religion, says Dr. Daut, is universe

44

MODERN RESEARCH

1

intelligence. There is no death. There are no dead. Reformation is
never denied us, here or hereafter."

The trumpet system, says Sauvin, is no more unusual than that of the
Oracle at Delphi or of the talking statues of the initiate priests of ancient
Egypt; the doctrines, familiar since the erection of temples, include: the
fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, immortality of the soul,
communication between departed human spirits and living mortals,
personal responsibility with compensation and retribution, a path of
eternal progress open to every soul by the path of eternal good, nature’s
laws, both spiritual and physical, and now communion with plants.

If communication of nonverbal messages turns out, as the evidence
hints, to transcend limitations of time and space, and to take place via
some spectrum of energies which is unrelated to what humans call
electromagnetic, the idea of a dialogue with unseen intelligences
active in planes beyond that of man’s self-limitations, such as was prac¬
ticed by mystics of the caliber of Jakob Boehme, may no longer seem

far-fetched. If we find the means to receive such messages we may
reopen the doors to the cosmos.

Plants That Open Doors 45

CHAPTER 4

Visitors from Space

One day late in October of 1971, a blue Volkswagen “bug” carrying
some unusual scientific equipment drove into Oak Grove Park near
Temecula, a tiny southern California village near the Pechenga Indian
Reservation, not far from the famous Mount Palomar Observatory. Out
of the driver’s seat stepped a forty-seven-year-old Silesian-born electron¬
ics engineer—L. George Lawrence. With a field assistant he had come
to this remote desertlike spot to record signals from wild-growing oak
trees, cacti, and yuccas. Lawrence chose the park because, in his words,
it is “an electromagnetic ‘deep-fringe’ area, with no man-made interfer¬
ences, and thus ideal for getting clean, uncontaminated plant reactions.’'

Ah important difference between Lawrence’s apparatus for capturing
plant signals and that of Backster, Vogel and Sauvin is that it incorpo¬
rates, in a temperature-controlled bath, living vegetal tissue shielded
behind a Faraday tube that screens out even the slightest electromag¬
netic interference. Lawrence found that living vegetal tissue is able to
perceive signals far more delicately than electronic sensors. It is his belief
that biological radiations transmitted by living things are best received
by a biological medium.

Lawrence’s equipment also differs significantly from that of the other
experimenters in that it dispenses with the need to use electrodes on
plants if they are far enough away from their neighbors to rule out signal
interference, as is usually the case in desert areas. Instead, Lawrence
simply trains a lensless tube with a wide aperture—the optical axes of
which parallel the design axis of the Faraday tube—at a target plant. At
greater distances he substitutes a telescope for the lensless tube, and
makes the plant more visible by hanging a white cloth on it,

Lawrence’s living tissue can pick up a directional signal from distances
up to one mile away. To stimulate his plant subjects into distinct reac¬
tions he “dumps a premeasured quantity of electricity into them,”
activating the stimulus by remote control with a timer which allows him
to walk or drive back to the sensing station. His exploratory experiments
are made during colder seasons when most vegetation is dormant, so as
to be doubly sure that spurious signals from other plants are not garbling
his measurements.

Perturbations in the living tissue of his recorder are detected, not

visually through a penrecorder, but aurally by means of a continuous, low

even whistle, similar to that produced by a sine-wave generator, which

changes into a series of distinct pulses whenever it is disturbed by signals
from a plant.

On the day of their arrival at Oak Grove Park in 1971 Lawrence and

his assistant took a break for a late-afternoon snack, seating themselves

shout ten yards from their instrument, which was left pointing randomly
at the sky.

As Lawrence bit into a Hebrew National knockwurst, the steady
w histling sound from his equipment was interrupted by a series of

Visitors from Space 47

distinct pulsations. Lawrence, who had not yet digested the knockvrarst,
but had well digested the Backster effect, thought the signals might have
been caused by his killing some of the cells in the sausage^ Second
thoughts reminded him that kosher sausage is biologically dead. As
Lawrence checked his instrumentation, the audio signal, to his amaze-
ment, continued to produce a distinct chain of pulses for over half an
hour before the even whistle returned, indicating that nothing more was
being received. The signals had to be coming from somewhere, and since
his device had been continuously pointed upward toward the heavens,
Lawrence was faced with the fantastic thought that something or some -

one was transmitting from outer space.

The implications of the phenomenon were such that on their way

home Lawrence and his partner could not avoid discussing them though,

for the moment, they decided not to make public their finding in the

event that not true signals but "bugs” » *eir equipment could have

produced what they had heard. The possibility of life beyond earth was

both disturbing and exciting to them. Hints about life elsewhere have

so far been vague, including the discovery of "organized elements or

organisms in meteorites, and infrared spectra on Mars which imply

organic molecules. There are also rare nonrandom radio interstellar

Signals whose reception was claimed by Tesla and Marconi but t ey

were so ridiculed that they were finally reduced to silence; and there are

intergalactic radio emissions from pulsars.

Loath to jump to a premature conclusion that he had picked up an
intelligent signal from trillions of miles away through a plant tissue,
Lawrence spent several months improving his equipment into what he
termed a “biodynamic field station designed for interstellar signal rece?-

By April of 1972, his equipment was sufficiently refined for him to
attempt to point it once more in the same direction which had broug
the reaction at the time of the sausage biting. As a laser expert an
author of the first technical book on that subject to appear in Europe,
Lawrence had carefully noted the direction in which his apparatus ha
been pointing and had determined that it was aligned on Ursa Mapr,
a seven-star constellation in the region of the north celestial pole, pop*

i called the Big Dipper. To insure that the equipment would be
y ted as far away from life forms as possible, Lawrence drove out to
h pisgah Crater, a volcanic butte at twenty-three-hundred-feet eleva-
. in t he middle of the arid Mojave Desert, The crater is surrounded
k°some thirty square miles of flat lava beds with not so much as a blade
f grass. Aligning his telescope—coupled with the Faraday tube, a cam-
an electromagnetic interference monitor, and the tissue chamber
toceiestial coordinates 10 hours 40 minutes plus 56 degrees, which gave
him the general direction for Ursa Major, Lawrence switched on his
audio signal. After a ninety-minute interval, his equipment again picked
up a recognizable, though briefer, pattern of signals. According to Law-
rence, the periods between rapid series of pulses ranged from approxi¬
mately three to ten minutes over a stretch of several hours as he moni¬
tored a single spot in the heavens.

Having thus successfully repeated his 1971 observations, Lawrence

began to wonder whether he had not accidentally stumbled on a scien¬
tific discovery of major proportions. He had no idea from where the
signals might be coming or what or who was sending them, but it
seemed to him highly possible that galactic drift played some role in
their origin. “The signals might be spilling over from the galactic equa¬
tor, which has a dense star population," said Lawrence. “We could be
getting something from that area rather than from the Big Dipper.

After the Mojave Desert confirmation of his first observations, Law¬
rence continued tests from his residence-laboratory, pointing his ma¬
chine at the same coordinates, leaving it on round the clock. Lawrence
says that he had to wait weeks and sometimes months for the signals to
come through but, when they did, the reception of something was
unmistakable. One signal produced a brr-r-r-r-r beep-beep-beep type of
audio pulse which Lawrence maintains no earthly entity has achieved.

Pressed to speculate on the nature of the strange signals, Lawrence
stated: “I don’t believe they are directed at earthlings. I think we are
dealing with transmissions between peer groups, and because we don t
know anything about biological communications we are simply excluded
from these Conversations.’ I also believe that the energy transmitted
must be fantastically high since our instrumentation is not at all soph is-

p

Visitors from Space 49

48 MODERN RESEARCH

ticated and it would take a tremendous amount of power to create any
response in it from such astronomical distances. The signals, therefore,
may be of an emergency nature. Something may be happening up there
and someone may be desperately calling for help/'

Deciding that his findings may be of crucial significance and could
herald a new and as yet unimagined system of communication, Law¬
rence has sent a copy of his October, 1971, tape, together with a
seven-page report, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,
where it is preserved as a potentially historical scientific document. The
report concludes:

An apparent train of interstellar communication signals of unknown
origin and destination has been observed. Since interception was made
by biological sensors, a biological-type signal transmission must be as¬
sumed. Test experiments were conducted in an electromagnetic deep-
fringe area, the equipment itself being impervious to electromagnetic
radiation. Follow-up tests revealed no equipment defects. Because inter¬
stellar listening experiments are not conducted on a routine basis, the
suggestion is advanced that verification tests should be conducted else¬
where, possibly on a global scale. The phenomenon is too important to
be ignored.

' Lawrence says the instrumentation tape, as a mere audio presentation,
is unpleasant to listen to, but reviewers of the tape have conceded that
“a fascinating degree of enchantment" tends to emerge after the tape
has been played back three or more times, typically over a period of

weeks.

The tape contains a short, incremental series of deep harmonious
oscillations resembling nonsense chatter or background modulations. An
intelligent character of the overall pulse train is implied by discrete
spacing patterns, apparent repetitions of sequences, and highly at¬
tenuated electromagnetic noise.

Lawrence looks forward to the day when he can arrange for computer
analysis of the taped signals, which might be able to provide additional
clues to their nature. They are far too rapid to allow manual extraction
of the data. Even so, he is not too optimistic that such analysis can
produce concrete results. “If the signals are of a personal nature, n®

50 MODERN RESEARCH

means known to modern computer technology will be able to decipher
them,” he says. "We simply do not have today bionic-type computers
which could collect seemingly random data and come up with a concise
and rational readout.”

Lawrence’s most important conclusion, that biological-type sensors
are needed in order to intercept biological signals, applies particularly to
communications from outer space. As he puts it: "Standard electronics
are next to worthless here, since ‘bio-signals’ apparently reside outside
of the known electromagnetic spectrum.”

Lawrence points out that in the 1950s scientists who had previously
insisted that our small planet was unique in the universe began to admit,
on the basis of careful celestial observations and other inferences, that
we may not be alone in the cosmic immensity, and to concede the
possible existence of extraterrestrials, whose development might be far
superior to our own.

In the early nineteenth century Karl Friedrich Gauss—the German
mathematician and physicist for whom an electromagnetic unit of mag¬
netic flux density is named—proposed that man might make known his
presence on earth to cosmic beings by cutting huge swaths hundreds of
miles long in the Siberian taiga to form a right angle. This was followed
by the suggestion of the Austrian astronomer J. J. von Littrow that
geometric canals be dug in the Sahara, filled with kerosene, and set
aflame at night; and the recommendation of the French scientist Charles
Gras that a vast mirror be built to reflect sunlight directly at Mars.

These farfetched ideas were updated when, in the summer of 1927,
radio observations were made which in the framework of then existing
knowledge seemed to imply that earth might be under the scrutiny of
communications satellites of extraterrestrial origin. Jorgen Hals, a
Norwegian radio engineer, while listening to a short-wave radio station
transmitting from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, heard weird echoes
jor which he could not account. Nor could a number of Dutch and

ri tish professors and technicians who carried out a series of experi¬
ments to confirm Hals’s findings.

The puzzling anomaly was all but forgotten until the early 1950s,
W en various specialists began to put forward a theory of extraterrestrial

Visitors from Space SI

interference to explain it. The theorists intrepidly assumed the '"tenn.t-
tent existence of an interstellar communications probe designed, rst,
to monitor solar systems for intelligent life, then retransmi ra
queney emanations from such life, including earthlings, back to a distant
“home-world ” Though these far-out interpretations were discounted,
even mocked, by the mainstream of scientific opinion, the,rente
became far less vocal when another series of observations was made, t u
time involving a television signal which appeared to have been received

after a mysterious delay of over three years.

In September, 1953, C. W. Bradley of London picked up the call

letters of the American station KLEE-TV in Houston, Texas on h,s
living-room television tube. Over the next several months the same
letters were observed on TV screens in the offices of Atlantic Electron,*
Ltd in the English city of Lancaster. What was eerie about these
receptions was not that the TV signal had been sent from so far away
since this happens often enough to cause no surprise, but that the signal

had been sent about three years prior to the time of lts r «-' e P tl0n ’
call letters KLEE having been changed to KPRC in 1950. Explanations
that the signals could have been stored in a “plasma cloud hoven g
above the earth which released the data in a broadcast for all to see gav
no reasons as to how this could have been done or why, and ««§««»•
that the whole thing was merely a meaningless—though extremely

pensive—hoax seem far-fetched. i

Spurred by the mysteries of these phenomena, Amencan research

began seriously to consider interstellar communications via radio JBu
radio was soon ruled out after it was realized that its ngths could

be absorbed by interstellar gas clouds and nebulae, blocked y™>
shielding layers around hoped-for faraway target planets, or affected
“t radio noise. Only one possible wavelength remained to read
such targets, the much shorter and more penetrating one emitte ,

neutral galactic hydrogen. , , q rn

But terrestrials still hoped to receive radio waves from space. In

Dr Frank Drake initiated Project Ozma-named for the pnneess wh

became ruler of the fictional kingdom of Oz-which used a huge eircub

radio telescope eighty-five feet in diameter at the National Radio As

52 MODERN RESEARCH

tronomy Observatory near Greenbank, West Virginia. Drake and his
colleagues hoped to detect possible intelligent extraterrestrial transmis¬
sions from the regions of two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.
Only recently was it discovered that orbiting Epsilon Eridani is a massive
planet six times the weight of Jupiter, largest of the nine planets now
known to revolve around the sun.

Although Ozma failed to obtain results, scientists are still hotly pursu¬
ing the subject of communication with extraterrestrial intelligences, the
phrase being now shortened into the acronym CETI.

In the summer of 1971, a group of American scientists at the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center com¬
pleted studies for a new Project Cyclops, which proposed a network of
ten thousand radio dish telescopes, forming a collective surface of several
square kilometers, to be mounted on rails and spread across one hundred
square miles of the New Mexican desert. Requiring a cybernetic “ner¬
vous system” of brand-new supercomputers, Cyclops was estimated by
Charles Seeger of New Mexico State University to cost Eve billion
dollars. In light of the stringent cutbacks in the U.S. space-research
funding, it is unlikely that Cyclops will become a reality. This leaves the
field to a huge radio telescope more than half a kilometer in diameter
currently under construction at the Astrophysical Observatory in the
Soviet Crimea.

All of these projects, Lawrence complains, assume that signals must
come by radio since that is the most efficient means of communication
known to the scientists of this planet. If they converted to his idea of
receiving biological signals, Lawrence feels they would have a much
better chance. The notion is echoed by Joseph F. Goodavage, author of
Astrology; The Space Age Science, who, in an article for Saga magazine
{January, 1973), stated: “Rigid enforcement of established Scientific
Method, as a kind of quasi-religion—with its burdensome ritual and
hadition—may be the most serious obstacle in the path of direct com¬
munication between Homo sapiens and other civilizations that may be
thriving throughout interstellar, intergalactic space.”

Employed as an instrumentation engineer for a Los Angeles space-
science corporation, Lawrence decided to design some more sophis-

Visitors from Space 53

ticated transducers—or converters of one type of input energy into!
another type of output energy. Knowing that a mechanical device which ■
could use heat, environmental pressure, electrostatic fields, and gravity
tional changes simultaneously was not up to the task, he theorized that
a plant might be able to turn the trick because it had the necessary
components built in by nature.

When he began to study the problem in 1963, Lawrence found he
could get no help from plant specialists and biologists because none of
them knew enough physics, and especially electronics, to visualize what
he was driving at. In his search for a biological system for radiating and
receiving signals, Lawrence began by going over the experiments made
in the 1920s by the Russian histologist Alexander Gurwitsch and his
wife, who proclaimed that all living cells produce an invisible radiation.
Gurwitsch had noticed that the cells in the tips of onion roots seemed
to be dividing at a definite rhythm. Believing this due to an extra
unexplained source of physical energy, Gurwitsch wondered whether it

might not come from nearby cells.

To test out his theory he mounted one root tip in a horizontally
oriented thin glass tube to act as a ray gun. This he pointed at a similar
onion root tip, also protected in a tube, but with a small area on one
side exposed naked to serve as a target. After three hours of exposure,
Gurwitsch examined sections from the target root under his microscope.
When he compared the number of cell divisions, he found 25 percent
more in the exposed, irradiated area. The receiver root had seemingly
picked up a vital energy from its sender neighbor.

To try to block the emission, Gurwitsch repeated the experiment with
a thin shield of quartz between the roots, but obtained essentially the
same results. However, when the quartz was coated with gelatin, or a
simple sheet of glass was substituted, no enhanced cell division could to
observed. Since glass and gelatin were known to block various ultraviolet
frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum, Gurwitsch concluded thal
the rays emitted by the cells of an onion root tip must be as short as Of i
shorter than ultraviolet. Because they apparently increased cell division
or “mitosis,” he called them “mitogenetic rays.” J

Gurwitsch’s findings had created a furor in the scientific world & 1

54 MODERN RESEARCH

laboratories hastened to check them. Since the wavelengths claimed for
the new rays were more powerful than the ultraviolet frequencies which
teach the earth from the sun, many biologists could not believe that
living processes were capable of generating them. In Paris two research¬
ers reported similar results, in \loscow one of Gurwitsch f s own country¬
men showed that he could increase the budding of yeast more than 25
percent by exposing it to “mitogenetic” rays from onion roots.

A pair of scientists at the Siemens and Halske Electric Company near
Berlin came to the verdict that the radiation was a fact; and in Frankfort,
a researcher actually succeeded in measuring it, not through its effect
on vegetal life, but with electrical instruments. On the other hand,
equally reliable Anglo-Saxon investigators could detect no effects. In the
United States, when the prestigious Academy of Sciences issued a report
that Gurwitsch’s discovery was not replicable, and therefore strongly

suggested it might be the product of his imagination, Gurwitsch was
sped into limbo.

Though Lawrence lacked an ultraviolet spectrometer to detect “mito¬
genetic radiation, he was fascinated by Gurwitsch f s system of directing
the energy. His observations also nudged Lawrence almost involuntarily
to the position that there was a psychological, or “mental," factor
involved in GurwitschV maverick work. Continuing to probe further
with a sensitive high-impedance device of his own design, Lawrence
sought to discover whether individual cells in'a quarter-inch slice of
onion, attached to a Wheatstone bridge and an electrometer, would
react to various stimuli. He found that they seemed to respond to
irritations such as a puff of smoke, or even to his mental image of their

destruction, in about one hundred milliseconds, or one tenth of a sec¬

ond.

^Vhat seemed most odd to Lawrence was that the reaction of the
°nion tissue seemed to change depending on whether he, or someone
6 p was directing thought at it. People with “psychic gifts" seemed to
j-iC!t much stronger responses than the practical-minded Lawrence. As
e commented: If one can cause, or get something to cause, harm to
Jf assuming that the cell has a cellular consciousness—the reaction
rem in it will change from experimenter to experimenter.”

Visitors /rom Space 55

.F

About this time Lawrence came across Backster s work and decide^
to build a sophisticated psycho-galvanic analyzer or plant response dete c .
tor. With his new equipment, Lawrence got a series of “wild'’ tracings
from his plants; but, because of what he retrospectively calls his “ign&
ranee and classical Prussian orthodoxy, he ascribed these effects to
faults in his instrumentation. Nevertheless, his suspicion that plant
tissues could pick up human thought and emotion slowly became mot E
concrete in the light of Backster s achievements. Lawrence was r E ,
minded that years previously Sir fames Jeans, the British astronomer,
had written that “the stream of human knowledge is impartially heading
toward a non-mechanical reality: the Universe begins to look more like
a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an
accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to
suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this

realm.”

In October of 1969, Lawrence began to publish a series of popular
articles based on his reading and research, the first of which appeared
as “Electronics and the Living Plant” in Electronics World Lawrenct
told his readers that, for the first time in the millennia since the first
green leaves poked their heads out of Paleozoic swamps, plants were al
last beginning to be studied for their “electrodynamic properties.”

Four main questions, said Lawrence, were starting to attract serious
attention: Could plants be integrated with electronic readouts to font
major data sensors and transducers? Could they be trained to respont
to the presence of selected objects and images? Were their alleged
supersensory perceptions verifiable? Of the 350,000 plant species knotfi
to science, which were the most promising from the electronic point 0

view?

Providing detailed instructions for investigating the behavior of livii?
plant cells with microelectrodes, Lawrence also reported that in tb
“Moon Garden” developed by Republic Aviation at Farmingdale, N*
York, scientists had been able in the 1960s to induce what appeared t
be “nervous breakdown” and “complete frustration in plants beifi
tested as possible space foods and that, even earlier, in his laboratory 1
East Grinstead, Sussex, England, L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Sci0

56 MODERN RESEARCH

olo gy, had noted that plants dislike certain types of artificial light, such
as the cold light emitted by sodium street lamps, which can cause them
to come out in a cold sweat clearly visible on their foliage.

Lawrence warned his readers that work with plants was not just a
matter of electronic expertise and that working with the Backster Effect
involved much more than the mere ability to construct top-quality
electronic equipment. "There are certain qualities here,” he wrote,
"which do not enter into normal experimental situations. According to
those experimenting in this area, it is necessary to have a ‘green thumb'
and, most important, a genuine love for plants."

Half a year later Lawrence followed up his revelations with an even
more controversial article in the same magazine, entitled “Electronics
and Parapsychology." Lawrence’s article began by asking: “Does man
possess latent sensitivities that have been stifled by modern communica¬
tions systems?” He then pointed out that although the fledgling science
of parapsychology, long suspect because of an occult background, was
having to fight for acceptance, the application of electronic instruments
was permitting dramatic new experiments and bringing forth stunning
discoveries which might rival the orthodox communications arts and
sciences currently in use.

Stressing that the need for machine systems capable of testing ESP
in an unbiased, impartial manner had been recognized fifty years ago,
when an Italian scientist, Federico Cazzamalli, developed an ultra-high-
frequency apparatus for testing human telepathy, Lawrence reported
that the Italian’s experiments had never been repeated because the
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had declared the work secret.

A fascinating offspring of Cazzamalli's ideas and machine, continued
Lawrence, is an apparatus called the “Integratron,” researched by
George W. van Tassel, a self-taught inventor living in Yucca Valley,
California, not far from the Giant Rock airport. Developed over twenty
years, and still under construction, van Tassel’s contrivance is housed in
a non-metallic domelike structure thirty-eight feet high and fifty-eight
feet in diameter, which looks like an astronomical observatory. It is an
electrostatic, magnetic generator with armatures over four times larger
than any others in existence. The Proceedings of van Tassel’s College

Visitors from Space 57

of Universal Wisdom state that the fields generated by his machine
encompass its entire structure and this is why the dome contains m
nails, bolts, or metal but is held together like a Chinese puzzle and is
six times stronger than the commercial building code requires. When
completed it promises, says van Tassel, not only to help solve the pro]>
lem of extraterrestrial communication, but to afford such possibilities as
rejuvenation of body cells, an antigravity force, and the ultimate q|
psychic experiences: time travel.

What puzzles orthodox scientists and makes skeptics of many of them
is a lack of any working theory to cover this kind of phenomenon. On«
scientist, Dr. W. G. Roll, in his presidential address to the 7th Annual
Convention of the Parapsychological Association held in Oxford, En
gland, in 1964, postulated “psi-fields,” which might be analogous to
electromagnetic or gravitational fields, possibly possessed by all objects*
living and nonliving, which could react with known physical fields and
with one another. Another theory, put forward by Dr. G. D. Wasserman
at the Ciba Foundation Symposium in 1956, leans on quantum mechan
ics. Wasserman suggests that '"psi-fields,” which enable persons to have
paranormal experiences, are due to the reception of inconceivably small
"quanta of energy,” far more minute than those which can be absorbed
' by matter fields of classical physics.

The Backster Effect and other related considerations, says Lawrence,
"lead to the idea that psi is but a part of a so-called ‘paranormal matrix
—a unique communications grid which binds all life together. It!
phenomena apparently work on a multi-input basis which operate!
beyond currently known physical laws.” Within this framework, say
Lawrence, plants, after sensitization or conditioning by their owners
can reach a state of communication in which they are able to react tt
their owners' emotions or states of mind even when they are far away

In the June, 1971, issue of Popular Electronics , Lawrence provide*
any researcher wishing to investigate communication with plants witl
detailed diagrams and a parts list for a "response detector” allowing ft*
extremely sensitive tests.

Warning that constant repetition was an important factor in sud
testing, Lawrence stated that if a plant specimen is stimulated conti rut

58 MODERN RESEARCH

nusly> hadly injured, or infrequently watered, it would tire quickly, or
even lapse into shock and die. Researchers were therefore cautioned to
jje gentle with their plants and allow them to recuperate after ex¬
perimentation. The area in which plants live must be quiet, added
Lawrence, “so that the stimuli can be effectively applied with a mini¬
mum of power-line noise or disturbances from radio-frequency transmis¬
sion to cause faulty indications.”

Lawrence's ideas about plants were corroborated and elaborated by
the experience of a Czech publisher and student of physiological psy¬
chology, Jan Merta, now living in Canada, whose psychic gifts allow him
to plunge an iron bar into a blacksmith's forge, heat it to incandescence,
then calmly brush sparks off its white-hot end with his bare hand as easily
as he would rub dust from a shelf.

Freshly settled in Canada, Merta supported himself for two months
by working as a troubleshooter for a large Montreal grower and importer
of tropical plants. When clients in office and residential buildings com¬
plained that their plants were getting sick, Merta was sent to.ascertain

the trouble. Because he also took care of thousands of plants in the firm's

#

extensive greenhouses, Merta noticed that the effects of loneliness pro¬
duced when a plant is taken away from hundreds of its friends often
caused it such a shock that it would pine, even die; however, when
returned to the greenhouse, it immediately perked up and regained its
normal green health.

As the result of hundreds of “house calls,” Merta noticed that plants
throve better when constantly communicated with by office workers and
home owners than if left to themselves. Examples of the majestic Ficus
benjamini, nearly thirty feet tall, transported from Florida, though in
excellent condition upon arrival, when placed around a fountain in a
shopping center’s indoor circular solarium started to wilt within two days
ln spite of careful watering and feeding. Yet those in heavily traveled
Passageways leading to the solarium retained their radiant vigor. To
Merta this was a sure sign that the Ficus enjoyed being admired by the

Passers-by.

In 1970, when Lawrence read that in the Ukraine radio frequencies
and ultrasonic vibrations had been used to stimulate cereal grain seeds

Visitors from Space 59

to produce higher yields as far back as the early 1950s and that the
United States Department of Agriculture had successfully experimented
in the same way, he gave up his college position and set about indepen.
dently developing advanced equipment with which he hopes that seed
grains can be provoked, on a commercial scale, to grow better and faster.
“If a plant seedling can be stimulated on a parapsychological basis, as
the famous plant breeder Luther Burbank knew, then I don't see why,"
says Lawrence, “we can’t transmit specific signals to whole fields of crops
to stimulate their growth without all these damned soil-killing fertiliz.

j j

ers.

In the February, 1971, issue of Popular Electronics Lawrence pre¬
sented his own experimental arrangement to test his theories about
stimulating plant growth in an extremely high-voltage electrostatic field
It is the invention and use of cheap chemical fertilizers, he asserted,
which has suppressed the ideas of countless engineers about how to
nourish plants electrically. With nitrate pollution from these fertilizers
threatening the world’s ecological panorama and its water supply, he
urges that these ideas be revived.

Acting on his own advice, Lawrence is working up patent applications
on special sound-type plant stimulation techniques, which he is combin¬
ing with Backster Effect methods in order to stimulate his plants in a
wireless fashion. This effort has turned Lawrence the engineer into

Lawrence the philosopher. “There was a time, when I was a child, when
the whole world seemed alive and knowing,” he wrote in Organic Gar¬
dening and Farming. “Trees were friends and as George Eliot put it:
‘Flowers see us and know what we’re thinking about.’ Then came a time
when plants just grew, silently and without emotion. But today, I’m
entering a second childhood, as least as far as plants are concerned."

Lawrence, torn between his interest in stimulating plant growth elec¬
trically and his projects to achieve interstellar communication, feels that
the effort to contact extraterrestrial life is more important in the long
run because “if routine results can be achieved in CETI, many questions
attached to riddles in the plant kingdom will be answered as a conse¬
quence.

On June 5, 1973, the research division of Anchor College of Truth

60 MODERN RESEARCH

in San Bernardino announced that it was inaugurating the world’s first
,-^Qgicahtype interstellar communications observatory under the direc¬
tion of L. George Lawrence, now also a vice-president of Anchor. For
the new research program Lawrence has designed what he calls a Stellar-
tron, which combines in one three-ton instrument the features of a radio
telescope and the biological signal-receiving system of the biodynamic

field station.

Anchor president, Ed Johnson, told the press that since radio as¬
tronomy had failed to detect intelligent signals from space, the college
was backing Lawrence's idea that radio transmission was out of date and
that biological communication should be given a trial.

Pointing out that in our own galaxy alone there are some 200 billion
stars, Lawrence says that if one assumed each of them to have at least
five companion planets, a total of one trillion might consequently be
available for study. Even if only one planet in a thousand has intelligent
life this would amount to one billion in our galaxy alone. Multiplied by
the ten billion galaxies believed to comprise the observable universe,
then there may be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets capable of send¬
ing some kind of signal to Earth.

Anchor's founder, Reverend Alvin M. Harrell, thinks that contact
with another race in the universe will trigger a tremendous explosion of
knowledge. As Harrell says: “Given the destructive brutality of human¬
kind, we may expect any newly discovered civilization to be infinitely
more loving and compassionate than we are.”

“Perhaps plants are the true extraterrestrials,” Lawrence observes,
“for they converted an early mineral world into a habitat suitable for
man by processes that border on near-perfect magic! What remains to
be done now is to remove all traces of occultism and make plant re¬
sponse, including communications phenomena, a verifiable component
of orthodox physics. Our instrumentation concepts reflect this effort.”

If Lawrence is on the right track, the ardently desired prospect of
Producing hardware to move man into the vastness of interstellar space
on Columbian voyages of discovery will be rendered as obsolete as
Columbus’s flagship, Santa Maria. Lawrence’s research, suggesting as it
does that intelligences are communicating instantly across distances

Visitors from Space 61

requiring millions of light-years to reach, indicates that what is needed
is not spaceships but the proper “telephone numbers to contact them.
Though the work is still in an exploratory stage, his biodynamic field
station may be a step toward plugging into the universal switchboard,
with plants as the pretty, cheerful and efficient co-operators.

i

62 MODERN RESEARCH

CHAPTER 5

Latest Soviet Discoveries

In Russia, millions of newspaper readers were introduced to the ideas
that plants communicate their feelings to man in October, 1970, when
Pravda published an article entitled “What Leaves Tell Us.”

Plants talk . . . yes, they scream,” declared the official organ of the
Communist party. “It only seems that they accept their misfortunes
submissively and silently bear pain.” Pravda 's reporter, V. Chertkov,
tells how he witnessed these extraordinary goings-on in Moscow when
visited the Laboratory for Artificial Climate at the renowned
uniryazev Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Before my eyes a barley sprout literally cried out when its roots were E
plunged into hot water. True, the plant’s “voice" was registered only by
a special and extremely sensitive electronic instrument which revealed a ■
“bottomless vale of tears" on a broad paper band. As though it had gone ■
crazy, the recording pen wriggled out on the white track the death agony
of the barley sprout, although, to look at the little plant itself, one would
never have guessed what it was going through. While its leaves, green as
ever, stood upright, the plant’s “organism” was already dying. Some kind
of “brain” cells within it were telling us what was happening.

Pravda's reporter also interviewed Professor Ivan Isidorovich Gunar, ‘
head of the academy's Department of Plant Physiology, who, together
with his staff, had performed hundreds of experiments, all of which
confirm the presence of electrical impulses in plants similar to the
well-known nerve impulses in man. The Pravda article noted that Gunar
talked about plants as he would about people, distinguishing their indi¬
vidual habits, characteristics, and proclivities. “He even appears to con-
verse with them," Chertkov wrote, and it seems to me that his plants
pay attention to this good, graying man. Only persons invested with
certain power are like this. I have even been told of a test pilot who
talked to his misbehaving airplane, and I myself have met an old captain

who talked with his ship.”

When Gunar's chief assistant, Leonid A. Panishkin, a former engi¬
neer, was asked by the Pravda reporter why he gave up the technology
in which he was trained in order to work in Gunar s laboratory, be
replied: “Well, there I used to be involved with metallurgy; here there
is life." He was echoed by another young laboratory worker, Tatiana
Tsimbalist, who affirmed that since she had come to work with Gunar
she had “learned to look at nature with different eyes.”

Panishkin said he was particularly interested in searching out those
conditions which might best suit the specific needs of plants and how
“our green friends "—as the Pravda reporter termed them—react to
light and darkness. By using a special lamp which shone with the same
intensity as the sun’s rays reaching earth he had found that plants tired
in an overextended day and needed rest at night. He hoped that it might
one day be possible for plants to turn lights on or off in a greenhouse
at will: “a live electric relay."

64 MODERN RESEARCH

The studies of the Gunar team may open up new vistas in plant
breeding, since in their laboratory it has been found that individual
plants more resistant to heat, cold, and other climatological factors can
be “selected" within minutes by testing them with their instruments,
although these qualities have heretofore taken geneticists years to estab¬
lish.

In the summer of 1971, an American delegation from the Association
for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), founded by the seer and healer
Edgar Cayce at Virginia Beach, Virginia, visited Russia. The Americans
—four medical doctors, two psychologists, one physicist, and two educa¬
tors—were shown a film by Panishkin entitled Are Plants Sentient? The
film demonstrated effects produced on plants by environmental factors
such as sunlight, wind, clouds, the dark of night, the tactual stimulus
from flies and bees, injuries produced by chemicals and burning, and
even the very proximity of a vine to a structure to which it might cling.
The film showed further that the immersion of a plant in chloroform
vapor eliminates the characteristic biopotential pulse normally apparent
when a leaf is given a sharp blow; it also indicated that the Russians are
now studying the characteristics of these pulses to establish the relative
degree of a plant’s health.

One of the American doctors, William McGarey, head of the ARE
medical research center in Phoenix, Arizona, stated in his report that
the intriguing part of the movie was the method used to record the data.
Time-lapse photography made the plants seem to dance as they grew.
Flowers opened and closed with the coming of darkness as if they were
creatures living in a different time zone. All injury-induced changes were
recorded by a sensitive polygraph attached to the plants.

In April, 1972, Weltwoche , a Swiss newspaper published in Zurich,
came out with an account of both Backster’s and Gunar's work which

said had taken place simultaneously and independently. That same
^cek the Swiss article was translated into Russian in a weekly review of
me foreign press, Za Ruhezhom ( Abroad ) published in Moscow by the
USSR’s Union of Journalists, under the caption: “The Wonderful
of Plants." These scientists, said the Russian version, are
proposing that plants receive signals and transmit them through special

Latest Soviet Discoveries 65

channels to a given center, where they process the information and
prepare answering reactions. This nervous center could be located in
root tissues which expand and contract like heart muscle in man. Th e j
experiments showed that plants have a definite life rhythm and die when j

they don’t get regular periods of rest and quiet. ;

The Weltwoche article also caught the attention of the editors ot the
Moscow newspaper Izvestiya, who assigned their reporter M. Matveyev
to do a story for the paper’s weekly magazine supplement. Though the
newsman referred to Backster’s suggestion that plants might have mem¬
ory, language, and even rudiments of altruism, he strangely omitted
Backster's most startling discovery, that his philodendron had perceived

his intent to harm it.

Deciding {the Izvestiya reporter told his readers) that a sensation was
being propagated in Western newspapers,” Matveyev traveled to Lenin¬
grad, where he interviewed Vladimir Grigorievich Karamanov, director
of the Laboratory of Biocybernetics of the Institute of Agrophysics, in

order to get an authoritative opinion.

The Institute of Agrophysics was founded over forty years ago at t c
behest of the renowned solid-state physicist, Academician Abram
Feodorovich Ioffe, who became particularly interested in the practical
s application of physics to the design of new products, first in industry,
then in agriculture. After the institute opened its doors, Karamanov,
then a young biologist, was inspired by Ioffe to familiarize himself with
the world of semiconductors and cybernetics and, in due course, began
building microthermistors, weight tensiometers, and other instruments
to register the temperature of plants, the flow rate of fluid in their stems
and leaves, the intensity of their transpiration, their growth rates, and
characteristics of their radiation. He was soon picking up detailed infor¬
mation on when and how much a plant wants to drink, whether it craves

more nourishment or is too hot or cold. In the first issue of Re P 0 ^
the USSR Academy of Sciences for 1959, Karamanov published T *
Application of Automation and Cybernetics to Plant Husbandry.

According to the Izvestiya reporter, Karamanov showed that an or i
nary bean plant had acquired the equivalent of ‘"hands to signal afl
instrumental brain how much light it needed. When the brain sent ttf

66 MODERN RESEARCH

"hands” signals, “they had only to press a switch, and the plant was thus
(forded the capability of independently establishing the optimal length
of its ‘day’ and night.’ ” Later, the same bean plant, having acquired
the equivalent of “legs,” was able instrumentally to signal whenever it
wanted water. “Showing itself to be a fully rational being,” the account
continued, “it did not guzzle the water indiscriminately but limited
itself to a two-minute drink each hour, thus regulating its water need

with the help of an artificial mechanism.

“This was a genuine scientific and technical sensation,” concluded
the Izvestiya reporter, “a clear demonstration of twentieth-century
man’s technical abilities.”

Asked whether.he thought Backster had discovered something new,
Karamanov somewhat condescendingly replied: “Nothing of the sort!
That plants are able to perceive the surrounding world is a truth as old
as the world itself. Without perception, adaptation does not and cannot
exist. If plants had no sense organs and didn’t have a means of transmit¬
ting and processing information with their own language and memory,
they would inevitably perish.”

Karamanov, who throughout the interview made not a single com¬
ment on plants’ ability to perceive human thought and emotion—
Backster’s really sensational discovery—and seemed oblivious of Back¬
ster’s success in getting his philodendron to recognize a “plant assassin,
rhetorically asked the Izvestiya reporter: “Can plants discern shapes?
Can they, for instance, differentiate a man causing them hurt from
another who waters them?” Replying to his own question, while at the
same time putting Backster into what he considered to be a proper
perspective for Soviet readers, Karamanov said: “Today I cannot answer
such a question. And not because I doubt that Backster’s experiments
were immaculately set up and repeatedly performed, though perhaps a
door slammed, or a draft wafted into the room, or something else. The
feet is that neither he, nor we, nor anyone else in the world is yet ready
to decipher all plant responses, hear and understand what they ‘say’ to
°oe another, or what they ‘shout’ at us.”

Karamanov also predicted that in the long run it would be possible
tybernetically to direct all the physiological processes of plants not, as

Latest Soviet Discoveries 67

he put it, “for the sake of sensation, but for the advantage of plants |
themselves.” When plants are able to auto-regulate their environment
and establish optimal conditions for their own growth with the help of
electronic instruments, said Karamanov, this should be a long step to.!
ward larger harvests of cereal grains, vegetables, and fruits. Making cleat i
that the achievements were not just around the corner, Karamanov
added, “We are not still learning to talk with plants and understand
their peculiar language. We are working out criteria which will help us
to control the life of plants. Along this difficult but fascinating road, a
multitude of surprises still await us.”

The Izvestiya article was followed that summer by a story in the
monthly magazine Nauka i Religiya (Science and Religion ), which has |
the dual aim of putting forward the latest findings in world science while
at the same time playing down—in a section headed “The Theory and
Practice of Atheism”—the church-defended notion of a spiritual world
hierarchically beyond that of man.

The article’s author, engineer A. Merkulov, going further than the;
Izvestiya weekend supplement, recounted how the plant of the “Ameri¬
can criminologist” Backster had not only responded to the scalding
death of brine shrimp but also to the killer of its vegetal neighbor. Such
response to people’s moods, added Merkulov, had also been detected at
the state university in Alma Ata, capital of the Soviet Kazakh Republic,
the apple orchard of the Soviet Union. There scientists have found that
plants repeatedly react to their owners’ illnesses and to their emotional
states.

Noting that plants had long ago been shown to have “short-term
memory,” Merkulov said that this fact too had been confirmed by the
Kazakh scientists. Beans, potatoes, wheat, and crowfoot ( Ranunculus)
after proper “instruction” seemed to have the capability of remember¬
ing the frequency of flashes from a xenon-hydrogen lamp. The plants
repeated the pulsations with what Merkulov called “exceptional accu¬
racy,” and since crowfoot was able to repeat a given frequency after 3
pause as long as eighteen hours it was possible to speak of “long-term
memory in plants.

The scientists next went on, according to Merkulov, to condition 3

68 MODERN RESEARCH

philodendron to recognize when a piece of mineralized rock was put
beside it. Using the system developed by Pavlov with dogs, whereby he
discovered the ^conditioned reflex,” the Kazakh scientists simultane¬
ously “punished a philodendron with an electrical shock each time a
mineralized ore was placed next to it. They reported that, after condi¬
tioning, the same plant, anticipating the hurtful shock, would get “emo¬
tionally upset whenever the block of ore was put beside it. Further¬
more, said the Kazakh scientists, the plant could distinguish between
mineralized ore and a similar piece of barren rock containing no miner¬
als, a feat which might indicate that plants will one day be used in
geological prospecting.

Merkulov concluded his reportage with the idea that the control of
all processes in plant growth was the ultimate goal of all the new
experimentation. In an institute of physics in the Siberian city of Kras¬
noyarsk, he wrote, Physicists are even now regulating the growth of a
monocellular seaweed, Chlorelh. Experiments are continuing and
becoming increasingly complex, and there is no doubt that in the not-
distant future scientists will be able to control the growth, not only of
the simplest, but of higher plants.”

Merkulov beguiled his readers with the idea that this control might
well be possible over great distances. “By studying how to understand’

p ants, e prophesied, man may create automatic contrivances which
themselves will watch over fields in such a way that, at any given
moment, they can satisfy the every need of crops. The day is not far away
* en scientists will also work out a theory on the adaptation and resis¬
tance of plants to unpleasant conditions m their environment which will

^compass how they react to irritants, and to stimulators and herbicides
dS well.

the end of 1972 Soviet readers were given more food for

iBi.*r arhcle F1 ° wer Reca11 ” P ublisl,ed in the popular color-
atated Znaniya Sila (Knowledge h Power), one of the many maga-

issued by the Knowledge Society, the leading organization for

Hune r SCIenCe ln the USSR T1>is time its author was not a news-
wy journalist or an inspired engineer but a professor and doctor of

° glcal sc,e nces, V. N. Pushkin. Far from suggesting that the

Latest Soviet Discoveries 69

American criminologist Backster had really not discovered anythin#
new, Pushkin began with a complete description of Backster’s shrimp
experiment. He then let his readers in on the fact that one of his young
colleagues, V. M. Fetisov, had made him aware of Backster’s accom.
plishments in the first place, and had been so determined to work wity
the Backster Effect that he had persuaded Pushkin to take part in the
experiments. Fetisov brought an ordinary potted geranium from hij
home and attached it to an encephalograph.

As Fetisov was making his first attempts to get a response from hi$
pet plant, Georgi Angushev, a Bulgarian student working up a disserta¬
tion in psychology at the Lenin Pedagogical Institute in Moscow, heard
about the Fetisov-Pushkin experiments and came to their laboratory to
see what was going on. Pushkin described Angushev as a talented r& ’
searcher with many qualities, the most important of which to theii!
“psycho-botanical experiments," as he termed them, was the fact that
the Bulgarian was an excellent hypnotist.

Fetisov and Pushkin surmised that a hypnotized person should be able
to send emotions to a plant more directly and spontaneously than a
person in a normal state. Hypnotizing a young girl by the name of
Tanya, who was described by Pushkin as of “lively temperament and!

- spontaneous emotionality,” they first implanted in her the notion tha!
she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, then the notion
that she was freezing in harsh raw weather. At each change in the girli
mood the plant, which was attached to an encephalograph, responded
with an appropriate pattern on the graph. “We were able," says Push¬
kin, “to get an electrical reaction as many times as we worked, even tn'

pf a number from 1 to 10. At the same time she was told she would never
reveal the number, even if pressed to do so. When the researchers
counted slowly from 1 to 10, pausing after each digit to inquire whether
it was the one she had thought of, each time Tanya responded with a
decisive “No!" Though the psychologists could not see any difference
in her answers, the plant gave a specific and clear reaction to her internal
state when the number 5 was counted. It was the number which Tanya
had selected and promised not to reveal.

In his conclusion Pushkin stated that he felt strongly that by pursuing

the course initiated by Backster it might be possible to make advances

into the thorny problem of the human brain’s functioning, which Pavlov

over half a century ago had called the "crown of earthly nature.” Seizing

die opportunity for a political remark, Pushkin reminded those who

might look askance at his and Fetisov's new research that at the opening

of Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1914 Pavlov had declared that the

task of unlocking the mysteries of the brain and its activity was “so

unexpressibly enormous and complex that it depends on the totality of

thought’s resources, namely, complete freedom, and bold deviation from
set patterns of research."

Using Pavlov as a shield against what he obviously thought would be
attacks from his professional colleagues, Pushkin stressed that the re¬
nowned physiologist’s statement was as up to date in 1972 as when he
ted made it. Lest his message not ring clear, he added: “Experience in
the development of natural sciences, especially physics, has shown that

one should not fear new discoveries, however paradoxical they might
seem at first glance."

the most arbitrary commands.” j

To obviate criticism that the plant’s response was only the result d
chance events taking place in the room, the Muscovite psychology
switched on their encephalograph and let it run for long periods betwetfj
their experiments. But the instrument never registered any reaction*!
the kind evoked in the plant by the emotions suggested to a hypnotize

subject. i

Pushkin and Fetisov decided to see whether the plant could det$
a lie, as Backster had claimed. It was suggested to Tanya that she

70 MODERN RESEARCH [

n His conclusion, the Moscow professor speculated that vegetal cells

! n * e flower react to Processes taking place in the nervous system of
®nan subjects or in what is vaguely referred to as their “emotional
es. Seeking a meaning for the flower’s reaction, Pushkin wrote:

nJr aPS between k™ informational systems, the plant cells and the
us system, a specific link exists. The language of the plant cell may
Elated to that of the nerve cell. These wholly different living cells
to be able to understand’ one another.”

* Ushkin further theorized that in the cells of a flower there take place

Latest Soviet Discoveries 71

processes somehow related tc mentation and asserted that man s psychf
—a word which he says is as yet entirely undefined even by the “ologists"
of his own discipline—and the perception, thought, and memory co*
nected to it are all just a specialization of processes existing at the level

of vegetal cells.

Pushkin asserts that this conclusion is most important since it will
open new thinking about the origin of the nervous system. Noting that
in the development of science many different answers have been pro.
posed for what constitutes the actual informational material in human
thought, Pushkin skipped lightly over various theories, ranging from tht
one that holds nerve cells to be elements of a living cybernetic computer
to the one which claims that not the cells but the molecules of matter
within them may be the basic informational units.

“What is actually irritating the flower?” asked Pushkin, then an¬
swered that it might turn out to be some kind of biophysical structure,
the ejection of which beyond the confines of the human organism takes
place the moment a marked emotional state is reached and carries
information about the person from whom it is ejected. Whatever the
truth may turn out to be, continued Pushkin, one thing is sure: “Re
search into the plant and man interrelationships can shed light on som
"of the most urgent problems in contemporary psychology.”

The magic and mystery of the world of plants lying behind thes
scientific doings have also recently become the subject of a new book
entitled Grass by a popular Slavophile writer, Vladimir Soloukhin, whicl
appeared in four issues of the three-million-circulation magazine Adtik
i Zhizn (Science and Life) at the end of 1972. Born a country boy it
a village outside the ancient city of Vladimir in northern Russia, Solo*
khin became fascinated with the Pravda account of Gunar’s work m
wondered why it had not evoked more excitement among his
Russians.

“Perhaps the elements of memory in plants are superficially treated
he writes, “but at least there they are in black and white! Yet no off 1
calls his friends or neighbors, no one shouts in a drunken voice over $
telephone: Have you heard the news? Plants can feel! They can $
pain! They cry out! Plants remember everything!”

When Soloukhin began to telephone his own friends in excitement
lie learned from one of them that a prominent member of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences, working in Akademgorodok, the new town inhab¬
ited almost exclusively by research scientists on the outskirts of Siberia’s
largest industrial center, Novosibirsk, had stated:

Don’t be amazed! We too are carrying out many experiments of this
kind and they all point to one thing: plants have memory. They are able
to gather impressions and retain them over long periods. We had a man
molest, even torture, a geranium for several days in a row. He pinched
• it, tore it, pricked its leaves with a needle, dripped acid on its living tissues,
burned it with a lighted match, and cut its roots, Another man took
tender care of the same geranium, watered it, worked its soil, sprayed it
with fresh water, supported its heavy branches, and treated its burns and
wounds. When we electroded our instruments to the plant, what do you
think? No sooner did the torturer come near the plant than the recorder
of the instrument began to go wild. The plant didn’t just get “nervous”;
it was afraid, it was horrified. If it could have, it would have either thrown
itself out the window or attacked its torturer. Hardly had this inquisitor
. left and the good man taken his place near the plant than the geranium
was appeased, its impulses died down, the recorder traced out smooth—
one might almost say tender—lines on the graph.

In addition to a plant’s ability to recognize friend and foe, Soviet
researchers also noted that one plant supplied with water can somehow
share it with a deprived neighbor. In one institute of research a cornstalk
planted in a glass container was denied water for several weeks. Yet it
did not die; it remained as healthy as other cornstalks planted in normal
conditions nearby. In some way, say Soviet botanists, water was trans¬
ferred from healthy plants to the “prisoner” in the jar. Yet they have
no idea how this was accomplished.

As fantastic as this may seem, a kind of plant-to-plant transfer has
^cn taking place in England in experiments begun in 1972 by Dr.
A. R. Bailey. Two plants in an artificially lit greenhouse in which temper-
j re, humidity, and light were carefully controlled w r ere suffering from
ck of water. Bailey and his collaborator measured the voltages gene-
j*d®d between two parts of both plants. When one plant was watered
m outside through plastic tubes, the other plant reacted. As Bailey

72 MODERN RESEARCH

Latest Soviet Discoveries 73

told the British Society of Dowsers: “There was no electrical connection
between them, no physical connection whatsoever, but somehow o ne
plant picked up what was going on with the other.”

Soloukhin, in his book Grass, the title of which conveys, as with Carl
Sandburg, Walt Whitman, or Pete Seeger, the most extended meaning
of the word “grass,” or indeed everything growing, took to task the lack
of sensitivity to the vegetal world around them on the part of the Soviet
populace. Targets of his criticism included agricultural bureaucrats, indi- •
vidual collective farmers, lumber executives, and even salesgirls in Mos-

cow Bower shops.

“Human observation,” writes Soloukhin ironically in the opening

chapter of Grass, “is so precise that we begin to notice the very air we
breathe only when it is insufficient for our needs. More exactly, I should
say 'value’ rather than 'notice.’ We do not really value air, or even think
about it, so long as we can breathe normally, without difficulty. He adds
that, though man prides himself on his vast array of knowledge, he is
like a radio technician who knows how to repair a receiver without
understanding the theoretical essence of radio waves, or like our cave¬
men ancestors who put fire to use while unaware of the process of rapid
, oxidation. Even today, says Soloukhin, we squander heat and light yet
have not the slightest clue to, or interest in, their original essence.

Man is equally callous, says Soloukhin, about the fact that the land
around him is green. “We trample grasses into dirt, we strip the land
with bulldozers and caterpillar treads, we cover it with concrete and hot
asphalt. Disposing of wastes from our infernal industrial machines we
dump upon it crude oil, rubbish, acids, alkalis, and other poisons. But
is there that much grass? I, for one, can imagine man in a boundless,
grassless wilderness, the product of a cosmic, or perhaps humanly non*
cosmic, catastrophe.”

Seeking to re-evoke wonder for nature in the hearts of an overurban
ized Soviet youth, Soloukhin tells the story of a prisoner who, incar¬
cerated in a dank cell, finds among the pages of an old book, given hit*,
by a kindly jailer, a tiny seed smaller than a pinhead. Overcome wi
emotion at the first visible sign of real life he has seen for years, t
prisoner imagines that the microscopic seed is all that remains from t

74 MODERN RESEARCH

former luxuriant and festive plant kingdom in the great world outside
the prison. Planting the seed in a bit of earth in the sole corner of the
cell afforded a ray of sunlight, and watering it with his tears, the prisoner
^aits for a wonder to unfold.

Soloukhin accepts this wonder as a true miracle ignored by man only
because it is repeated thousands of billions of times daily. Even if all the
world’s chemical and physical laboratories with their complex reagents,
precise analyses, and electronic microscopes were placed at the priso¬
ner's disposal, he continues, even if the prisoner studied the seed’s every
cell, atom, and atomic nucleus, he still would not be able to read the
mysterious program lying within the seed, to lift the impenetrable veil
which could cause it to transform itself into a juicy carrot, a branch of
sweet-scented dill, or a radiant-colored aster.

Soloukhin was fascinated with the statement by I. Zabelin, doctor of
geographical sciences and Moscow University professor, who in his
article "Dangerous Delusions” in one of the USSR’s leading opinion
forums, Literatumaya Gazette, wrote: “We are only beginning to com¬
prehend the language of nature, its soul, its reason. The 'inner world’
of plants is hidden from our gaze behind seventy-seven seals.” Though
these lines were in no way emphasized in the printed column, says
Soloukhin, “they appeared to me as bold-face type.”

During a trip to Paris, Soloukhin was happy to observe florist shops
pattered in all, and even the poorest, districts of the French capital.
Finding a decent bouquet of flowers in the Soviet capital, he says, can
become the object of a day-long search.

Soloukhin has recently attacked the obtuse views of Soviet agricultural
officials. Writing in the October, 1972, issue of Literatumaya Gazette,
he deplores the abandon with which generations-old natural Russian
uieadowlands have been allowed to deteriorate while fields needed for
°weal crops are being plowed and planted to grasses for animal fodder.

We could cover Europe with hay and green grass from our meadows
^d build a haystack extending from the Mediterranean to Scan¬
dinavia,” writes Soloukhin. “Well, why don't we?” His rhetorical ques-
only provoked an angry rebuttal from the USSR’s Deputy Minister
^ Agriculture, who insisted on upholding the status quo.

Latest Soviet Discoveries 75

1

J

I

In a battle similar to that taking place in the United States and other
countries, Soloukhin is unremittingly denouncing unecologically
minded industrialists in his country, who are turning the rivers and lakes
into cesspools, and despoiling its forests, all in the name of increased
production. Seeking to reverse a half century of Communist dicta, this
“passionate lover of nature, its defender and bard”—to quote one of
Soloukhin’s publishers—exhorts his countrymen to cooperate with,
rather than subdue, nature.

That the Soviets are bent on introducing the idea of substituting for
the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas—three forms of preserved solar
energy originally captured by plants—new, more direct, and pollution-
free ways to tap the sun was revealed by an article in the first 1973 issue
of Khimiya i Zhizn (Chemistry and Life). The article pointed to the
research of the American Nobel Prize winner Melvin Calvin in photo¬
synthesis, wherein he discovered that plant chlorophyll under the influ¬
ence of the sun’s rays can give up electrons to a semiconductor such as
zinc oxide. Melvin and his co-workers created a “green photoelement, n
which produced a current of approximately 0.1 microamperes per square
centimeter. After several minutes, said the Soviet magazine, the plant
chlorophyll becomes desensitized or “exhausted/ but its life could be
extended by the addition of hydroquinone to the salt solution which acts
as an electrolyte. The chlorophyll seems to act as a kind of electron
pump passing electrons from the hydroquinone to the semiconductor.

Calvin has calculated that a chlorophyll photoelement with an area
of ten square meters could yield a kilowatt of power. He has theorized
that in the next quarter century such photoelements could be manufac¬
tured on an industrial scale and would be a hundred times cheaper than
silicone solar batteries now being experimented with.

Even if the direct conversion of sunlight into energy via plant chloro¬
phyll is not realized by the year 2000, says Chemistry and Life, i!
wouldn’t put too much of a burden on man to wait a few decades longer
when he considers the millions of years it took to convert plants into
coal.

As Soviet readers were being offered the notion that plants could one
day directly produce energy for man’s needs from the sun, Professor
Gunar, together with an increasing number of young Soviet scientists,

76 MODERN RESEARCH

[ »as continuing to probe the awareness of plants to determine, for

f instance, how their reactions may serve as an index of frost, cold, and

j)£at resistance in varieties of barley and cucumbers and of disease
potentials in potatoes.

A clue to where Professor Gunar got the original inspiration to launch
his series of detailed and ongoing studies on plants, which were to have
such repercussions throughout the Soviet republics, is to be found in an
article published in 1958 by A. M. Sinyukhin. This colleague of Gunar’s
refers to an outstanding Indian physiologist and biophysicist whose work
was buried during his lifetime by Western science and hardly ever cited
since his death. As early as 1920 Kliment Arkadievich Timiryazev, in
whose honor the Moscow Agricultural Academy is named, heralded this
work as introducing a new epoch in the development of world science.
This unheralded genius, wrote Timiryazev, developed an apparatus,
startling in its simplicity and sensitivity, to counter the entrenched idea
of the German botanists that communication in plant tissue was simply
hydrostatic. In so doing, he was able to measure in hundredths of a

second the time needed for a signal to travel along the stems of various
plants.

Sinyukhin made clear that the USSR’s plant men were so impressed
by the achievements of this Indian scientist that they were going to
mount a research campaign based directly upon his long-ignored conclu¬
sions. In December, 1958, a pontifical meeting was held in the main
conference hall of the USSR Academy of Sciences in celebration of the
hundredth anniversary of the Indian sage’s birth. Three leading
academicians summed up for the huge crowd assembled the fantastic
breakthroughs which the Indian had made not only in plant physiology

ut in physics and in the vital and up to then unheard-of links between
fhese distinct disciplines.

Many years, during the course of which whirlwind developments
ve taken place in biophysics,’’ said A. V. Lebedinskii, one of the
^ ing Russian pioneers in radiobiology and space medicine, “separate

hv/ r ° m ^ me *^ s Indian’s work appeared. But, reading his works

ay, one still senses in them an unexpected and fruitful source of a
^ °Ic chain of ideas in contemporary science.”

n great work, said another speaker, “The green world of plants,

Latest Soviet Discoveries 77

seeming to us so immobile and insensitive, came miraculously to Life and
appeared no less, and often even more, sensitive than animals andl man.

Six years later the Soviet Union honored this neglected scientist by
publishing in two handsomely illustrated volumes his selected works,
together with copious commentaries including one entire book; which
had first made its appearance over half a century before, in 1902: Re¬
sponse in the Living and Non-Living. In these works Sir Jagadis Chandra
Bose managed to accomplish the essential requirement of the twentieth
century: an amalgamation of the wisdom of the ancient East wdth the
precise scientific techniques and language of the modern West.

78 MODERN RESEARCH

PART II

PIONEERS

OF PLANT MYSTERIES

CHAPTER 6

On the eastern coast of the subcontinent of India, in the old state of
Bengal, there stands on four acres of ground off the Acharya Prafulla-
chandra Road, north of Calcutta University, a complex of buildings
made of fine grayish and purple sandstone in the classical design of
Pre-Mohammedan India. The main edifice, known as the Indian Tem¬
ple of Science, bears an inscription: “This temple is dedicated to the feet
God for bringing honor to India and happiness to the world.”

Just inside the entrance are glass cases containing a series of intriguing

m

instruments devised more than fifty years ago to measure the growth and
Behavior of plants, down to their minutest detail, by magnification of

these processes up to 100 million times. The instruments stand in their
cases, in mute testimony to the genius of a great Bengali scientist whose
work united in one man the fields of physics, physiology, and psychology
and who found out more about plants than anyone before and perhaps
after him, but who remains almost unmentioned in classical histories of
subjects in which he specialized.

The buildings and their gardens are the Institute of Research built
by Sir fagadis Chandra Bose, of whose work in the field of plant physi¬
ology the Encyclopaedia Britannica could only say, nearly half a century
after his death, that it was so much in advance of his time it could not
be precisely evaluated.

When Bose was still a child, his father had already painfully discerned
in 1852 the main impact of the British education system on Indian
children: the imposition of a slavish and monotonous imitation of all
things Western and the requirement to learn by rote. The senior Bose,
therefore, sent his son to a simple village pathasala rather than a colonial
primary school.

At the age of four the boy was carried to his classroom on the
shoulders of a reformed gang robber, or dacoit, who could find employ¬
ment after a long jail term with no one but Bose's father. From this
v dacoit the boy absorbed stories of savage battles and adventurous es¬
capades, but was also exposed to the natural goodness of a man who had
been befriended after being rejected by society as a criminal. “No
nurse,” Bose wrote in his later life, “could have been kinder than this
leader of lawless men. Though he scoffed at the juridical strictures of
society, he had the deepest veneration for natural moral law.”

Bose's early contacts with the peasantry also were crucial to his own
appreciation of the world. Much later he told an academic gathering:
“It was from those who till the ground and make the land blossom with
green verdure, from the sons of fisher-folk who told stories of the strange
creatures that frequented the depths of mighty rivers and of stagnant
pools, that I first derived a lesson of that which constituted true man¬
hood. From them, too, I drew my love of nature.”

When Bose graduated from St. Xavier's College, his brilliant teachef
Father Lafont was so impressed by the young man’s aptitude in physic

82 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

jfid mathematics that he wanted him to go to England and read for the
0vil Service examinations. Bose's father, who had personally ex¬
perienced the deadening nature of that profession, advised his son to
become, not an administrator, but a scholar, with the prospect of ruling
ifcbody but himself.

At Christ College Bose was taught physics, chemistry, and botanical
sciences by such luminaries as Lord Rayleigh, discoverer of argon in the
air, and Francis Darwin, son of the evolutionary theorist. Having passed
his tripos examinations, Bose went on to take a bachelor's degree in
science the following year at London University. But when Bose was
appointed professor of physics at Calcutta’s Presidency College, reput¬
edly the best in India, the appointment was protested by the college’s
principal and by the director of Bengal’s public instruction, who main¬
tained the all too usual view that no Indian was competent to teach
science.

To get back at Bose for being recommended over their heads by a
letter from the Postmaster General to the Viceroy, they offered him a
special appointment at a salary only half that of the English professors,
and gave him no facilities to carry on research. In protest Bose refused
to touch his monthly salary check for three years, which obliged him to
live in bitter deprivation, the more so as his father had fallen heavily into

debt.

That Bose was brilliant as a teacher was attested by the fact that no
roll call had to be instituted in his classroom, which was always packed
to the walls. Bowing to his obvious talents, the authorities who had
snubbed him finally gave him a position at full pay.

Although Bose had no resources other than his own salary, a twenty-
Kfuare-foot room to serve as a laboratory, and an illiterate tinsmith
whom he trained as his mechanic, he began work in 1894 to see if he
Md improve the instruments recently devised by Heinrich Rudolph
Hertz to transmit “Hertzian” or radio waves through the air. Hertz, who
that same year at the premature age of thirty-seven, had startled
o World of physics by fulfilling in his laboratory the prediction of the
sottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, nearly twenty years before, that

Waves of any electrical disturbance in the ether”—the variety and

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 83

scope of which was far from known—would, like those of visible ligU
be reflective, refractible, and polarizable.

While Marconi in Bologna was still trying to transmit electric signal*
through space without wires, a race he was to win officially against
similar efforts by Lodge in England, Muirhead in the United States, and
Popov in Russia, Bose had already succeeded. In 1895, the year befo re
Marconi’s patent was issued, at a meeting in the Calcutta town hall
presided over by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, the lieutenant-governor of
Bengal, Bose transmitted electric waves from the lecture hall through
three intervening walls—and Mackenzie’s portly body—to a room sev¬
enty-five feet away, where they tripped a relay which threw a heavy iron
ball, fired off a pistol, and blew up a small mine.

Bose's accomplishments now began to attract the attention of the
British Royal Society (equivalent of the academy of sciences in other
countries), which, at Lord Rayleigh's behest, invited Bose to publish a
paper in its proceedings on the "Determination of the Wave Length of
Electric Radiation,” and offered him a subsidy from its parliamentary
grant for the advancement of science. This was followed by Bose’s being
awarded a doctorate of science by London University.

The Electrician, leading journal in its field, came forward to suggest
that, on the basis of Bose’s work, it might now become practical to place
electromagnetic transmitters in lighthouses and receivers on ships to
offer mariners a "third eye” capable of penetrating fog.

In England Bose gave a lecture on his apparatus for investigating
electromagnetic waves before a meeting of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science in Liverpool, which so impressed Lord
Kelvin that he limped up to the ladies’ gallery to congratulate Bose’s
beautiful wife in the most glowing terms on her husband’s brilliant work.
This triumph was followed in January, 1897, by an invitation to address
the Royal Institution at one of its Friday Evening Discourses, which,
since the institute’s establishment, had become the principal venue for
announcements of fresh and momentous investigations and discoveries.

Of Bose’s address the Times wrote: "The originality of the achieve¬
ment is enhanced by the fact that Dr. Bose had to do the work in
addition to his incessant duties and with apparatus and appliances which

84 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

jfo this country would be deemed altogether inadequate.” The Spectator,
echoing this accolade, announced: There is something of rare interest
in the spectacle of a Bengali of the purest descent lecturing in London
to an audience of appreciative European savants upon one of the most
.recondite branches of modern physical science.”
r ■ Back in India, Bose was buoyed to find that a communication signed
by Lord Lister, president of the Royal Society, and by other scientific
luminaries, had been sent to the Secretary of State for India, recom¬
mending that a center for research and advanced teaching in physics

‘ worthy of that great Empire” be established under Bose’s direction at
Presidency College.

Despite this recommendation, and an immediate grant by the Im¬
perial Government of £40,000 to set up the center forthwith, mean-
minded, jealous functionaries in the Bengal Education Department
succeeded in so tying up the project that it never came to fruition. Only
the gesture of his fellow Bengali, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, later
to win the Nobel Prize for literature, alleviated Bose's disappointment:
Tagore came specially to greet him and not finding him at home left
a huge magnolia blossom in token of his tribute.

Doggedly pursuing his research whenever the press of his teaching
duties in the backbiting climate of the college offered him a spare
moment, Bose published in 1898 four papers on the behavior of electric
waves, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and in Great Britain's
foremost popular scientific journal, Nature.

In 1899 Bose noticed the strange fact that his metallic coherer for
receiving radio waves became less sensitive if continuously used but
returned to normal after a period of rest. This led him to the conclusion
that metals, however inconceivably, might exhibit a recovery from fa¬
tigue similar to that which took place in tired animals and people.
Further work began to convince Bose that the boundary line between
«>-called "nonliving” metals and “living” organisms was tenuous indeed.
Spontaneously moving from the domain of physics into that of physi-
j > °gy, Bose began a comparative study of the curves of molecular reac-
h °n in inorganic substance and those in living animal tissue.

To his awe and surprise, the curves produced by slightly warmed

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 85

magnetic oxide of iron showed striking resemblance to those of muscles
In both, response and recovery diminished with exertion, and the conse.
quent fatigue could be removed by gentle massage or by exposure to a
bath of warm water. Other metal components reacted in animal-ij^
ways. A metal surface etched with acid when polished to remove all trace
of the etching exhibited reactions in its acid-treated sections which
could not be elicited in those nontreated. Bose ascribed to the affected
sections some kind of lingering memory of the treatment. In potassium
he found that the power of recovery was almost totally lost if it was
treated with various foreign substances; this seemed to parallel the
reactions of muscular tissue to poisons.

In a presentation to the International Congress of Physics, held in
1900 at the Paris Exhibition, entitled “De la Generalite des Pheno-
menes Moleculaires Produits par l’Electricite sur la Matiere Inorganique
et sur la Matiere Vivante,” Bose stressed the “fundamental unity among
the apparent diversity of nature,” concluding that “it is difficult to draw
a line and say that here the physical phenomenon ends and here the
physiological begins.” The congress was “bouleverse” by Bose’s earth-
shaking suggestion that the gulf between the animate and inanimate
might not be as broad and unspannable as generally believed; its secre¬
tary declared himself “stunned.”

The enthusiasm of his fellow physicists was, however, not matched
by the coterie of physiologists who were invited the following September
to a meeting of the physics section of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science at Bradford. Because Bose’s research over¬
lapped onto territory which they considered their private preserve, the
physiologists listened with hostile silence while Bose read a paper con¬
tending that Hertzian waves could be used as a stimulating agent on
tissues, and that metal response was analogous to that of tissues. To meet
the physiologists on their ground, Bose meticulously adapted his experi¬
ments to an accepted “electromotive variation” to which they were
accustomed, and again got similar curves of muscles and metals respond¬
ing to the effects of fatigue or of stimulating, depressing, and poisoning
drugs.

Shortly thereafter it dawned on Bose that if the striking continuity
between such extremes as metals and animal life were real he should also

|je able to get similar effects in ordinary vegetable plants, which, because
they were held to have no nervous systems, were universally reckoned
js unresponsive. Picking several horse-chestnut leaves from a tree in the
garden next to his lab, Bose found that they responded to various
“blows” in much the same way as had his metals and muscles. Excited
by the results, he betook himself to his greengrocer and purchased a bag
of carrots and turnips, which, of all vegetables, appeared the most
stolidly nonsentient, and found them to be highly sensitive. When he
chloroformed plants, Bose discovered that they were as successfully
anesthetized as animals, and that when the narcotic vapor was blown
away by fresh air like animals they revived. Using chloroform to tranquil-
ize a huge pine tree, Bose was able to uproot it and transplant it without
the usually fatal shock of such operations.

When Sir Michael Foster, secretary of the Royal Society, came to
Bose’s laboratory one morning to see for himself what was happening
and Bose showed the Cambridge veteran some of his recordings, the
older man said jocularly: “Come now, Bose, what is the novelty of this
curve? We have known it for at least half a century!”

“But what do you think it is?” Bose persisted quietly.

“Why, a curve of muscle response, of course!” said Foster testily.
Looking at the professor from the depths of his haunting brown eyes,
Bose said firmly: “Pardon me, but it is the response of metallic tin!”

Foster was aghast. “What?” he shouted, jumping from his chair,
“Tin? Did you say tin?”

When Bose showed him all his results, Foster was as thrilled as he was
astounded. On the spot, he invited Bose to give an account of his
discoveries at another Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution
and offered to communicate his paper personally to the Royal Society
m order to secure his priority. At the evening meeting of May 10,1901,
Bose marshaled all the results obtained over four years and demonstrated
eac h one of them with a comprehensive series of experiments before
e nding with a peroration:

I have shown you this evening autographic records of the history of
stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings!

So similar indeed that you cannot tell one apart from the other. Among
such phenomena, how can we draw a line of demarcation and say, here

86 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 87

the physical ends, and there the physiological begins? Such absolute
barriers do not exist.

It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self-made records,
and perceived in them one phase of a pervading unity that bears within
it all things—the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life
upon our earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us—it was then that
I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my
ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago: “They who see
but one, in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them
belongs Eternal Truth—unto none else, unto none else!”

Bose’s lecture was warmly received and to his surprise his views went
unchallenged, despite the metaphysical note at its end. Sir William
Crookes even urged that the last quotation not be omitted when the
address was published. Sir Robert Austen, one of the world’s authorities
on metals, praised Bose for his faultless arguments, saying, “I have all
my life studied the properties of metals and am happy to think that they
have life.” He confessed confidentially that he had formed a similar
opinion but had been rebuffed when he had once hesitantly hinted at
it before the Royal Institution.

A month later, when Bose repeated his lecture and demonstrations
before the Royal Society, he received an unexpected blow from “the
grand old man of physiological science in England,” Sir John Burdon-
Sanderson, whose principal work had been a study of muscle behavior
and the movements of the Venus’s flytrap to which Darwin had first
called his attention. As Burdon-Sanderson was the authority on electro¬
physiology, all turned to him to open the discussion which followed
Bose’s speech.

Burdon-Sanderson began by complimenting Bose on his acknowl¬
edged work in physics but followed with the remark that it was “a great
pity” that he had wandered from his own field of study to areas which
belonged properly to the physiologist. Since Bose's paper was still under
consideration for publication he suggested that its title be changed from
‘Electrical Response in . . .” to "Certain Physical Reactions in . . ■ >"
thus leaving to the physiologists the term “response” with which physi¬
cists should not be concerned. As for the electrical responses of ordinary
plants, which Bose had described at the end of his address, Burdon-

88 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

Sanderson denied categorically that such were possible, since “he him-
se lf had tried for many years past to obtain them and had never suc¬
ceeded.”

In his reply Bose said candidly he understood that the facts experi¬
mentally demonstrated were not questioned by his critic. If, therefore,
he was not being impugned on the basis of this evidence, but was being
asked to make modifications which altered the whole purpose and mean¬
ing of his presentation, on the basis of authority alone, he would have
to decline. It seemed to Bose inexplicable, he said, that any doctrine
could be advocated before the Royal Society which suggested that
knowledge could not advance beyond known bounds. Unless he was
shown on scientific grounds where his experiments were faulty or defec¬
tive, he would insist his paper be published as he had written it. At the
end of his rebuttal, when no one rose to break the icy silence which hung
over the hall, the meeting was adjourned.

Because of doubt thrown on his work by so eminent an expert as
Burdon-Sanderson, and to put down a younger man who had so outspok¬
enly challenged his senior, the society voted not to follow up Bose’s
“preliminary notice” with the full publication of his paper in its Proceed¬
ings, and instead buried it in its archives, a fate which had befallen other
notable papers in the past. To Bose, who all his life had listened to
Britishers lecture against the evils of the Indian caste system, the vote
seemed to evidence the existence of a not dissimilar system within
British science itself. At the institution's laboratories, Bose was consoled
by Lord Rayleigh, who told him that he too had been subjected to
ceaseless attacks from chemists because, as a physicist, he had had the
temerity to predict that a hitherto unsuspected new element would be
found in air, a prediction shortly to be verified by his discovery, with the
help of Sir William Ramsay, of argon.

The controversy with the physiologists elicited the interest of Bose’s
former teacher Professor Sidney Howard Vines, the well-known botanist
and vegetable physiologist at Oxford, who called on Bose and asked if
he could witness Bose’s experiments. Vines brought with him T. K.
Howes, who had succeeded T. H. Huxley at the British Museum’s
department of Botany at South Kensington. When the men saw Bose’s

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 89

plant respond to stimulus, Howes exclaimed: “Huxley would have giv e „
years of his life to see this experiment.” As secretary of the Linnean
Society, he told Bose that, since his paper had been refused for publica¬
tion by the Royal Society, not only would the Linnean accept it but also
he would invite Bose to repeat all his experiments before the physiolo-
gists, particularly his opponents.*

As a result of this new presentation to the Linnean Society, on
February 21,1902, Bose was able to write to his friend Tagore: “Victory!
1 stood there alone, ready for hosts of opponents, but in fifteen minutes
the hall was resounding with applause. After the paper, Professor Howes
told me that as he saw each experiment, he tried to get out of it by
thinking of a loophole of explanation, but my next experiment closed
that hole.” The president of the Linnean Society wrote Bose a few days
later: “It seems to me that your experiments make it clear beyond doubt
that all parts of plants—not merely those which are known to be motile
—are irritable, and manifest their irritability by an electrical response
to stimulation. This is an important step in advance, and will, I hope,
be the starting point for further researches to elucidate what is the
nature of the molecular condition which constitutes irritability, and the
nature of the molecular change induced by a stimulus. This would
doubtless lead to some important generalities as to the properties of
matter, not only living matter, but non-living matter as well.”

Since ordinary plants and their different organs exhibited electrical
response indicative of excitation under mechanical and other stimuli, it
puzzled Bose that they gave no sign of this excitement by visible move¬
ment. Unlike the mimosa leaf, which, if irritated, abruptly collapses,
owing to a contraction of its cushion-shaped base, or pulvinus, other
plants seem, at least to the eye, placidly unconcerned when scraped,
burned, or otherwise interfered with. Back home in Calcutta, it suddenly
hit Bose that the contraction in the mimosa was magnified by its long
leaf stalk. To similarly magnify a suspected contraction in other plants,

‘The Linnean Society, named after Carl von Linne or Linnaeus (1707-1778), the great
Swedish botanist whose Genera Plantorum is considered the starting point of modem
systematic botany, was organized at the end of the eighteenth century when Sir J- F
Smith, its first president, acquired Linnaeus’ botanical library from his widow.

90 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

he designed a special optical lever with which he was able to demon¬
strate visually that all the characteristics of the responses exhibited by
animal tissues were also found in those of plants.

Bose communicated the results of these new and extended investiga¬
tions in December, 1903, in a series of seven papers to the Royal Society,
which immediately planned their publication the following year in its
“Philosophical Transactions, a series reserved for only the most signifi¬
cant and momentous scientific findings. However, as the papers were
being readied for the printer, underhanded intrigues and prejudicial
insinuations, which had almost suppressed his Linnean Society offering,
began anew and, with Bose unable to refute them from far-off India,
won the day.

Convinced by Bose’s opponents that his theories should not be offi¬
cially printed, and without waiting for his detailed records, the society
changed its august mind and once again filed Bose’s papers in its ar¬
chives. To Bose this vacillation by the society only justified his decision,
taken two years before, no longer to rely wholly upon the acceptance of
others before presenting his astonishing discoveries to the world. “Al¬
though, as he put it, “I thought I was much too lazy to write books,

I was forced into it.” To guarantee that the substance of the lectures
he had given in London, Paris, and Berlin should receive the widest
possible circulation, Bose completed a book-length account of all his
experimentation up to the middle of 1902, which was published the
same year under the title Response in the Living and Non-Living.

Herbert Spencer, the great British synthetic philosopher, very much
alive to the important scientific advances of his time, despite his entry
at eighty-three into the last year of his life, personally acknowledged
Bose s volume with the regret that it was too late for him to incorporate
'ts data into his own massive Principles of Biology. Two years later,
Professor Waller, one of Bose’s most adamant opponents, quietly in¬
erted into his new book, without even mentioning Bose’s name, the
ngali s assertion that “any vegetable protoplasm gives electrical re¬
sponse.”

Bose then began to concentrate on determining how mechanical
Movements in plants might be similar to those in animals and humans.

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 91

Since he knew that in plants there was respiration without gills or lungs
digestion without a stomach, and movements without muscles, j(
seemed plausible to Bose that there could be the same kind of excitation
as in higher animals but without a complicated nervous system.

Bose concluded that the only way to find out about the “unseen
changes which take place in plants” and tell if they were “excited or
depressed” would be to measure visually their responses to what he
called “definite testing blows” or shocks. “In order to succeed in this ”
he wrote, “we have to discover some compulsive force which will make
the plant give an answering signal. Secondly, we have to supply the
means for an automatic conversion of these signals into an intelligent
script. And, last of all, we have ourselves to learn the nature of these
hieroglyphics.” In this single statement Bose mapped out for himself a
course for the next two decades.

He first began by improving his optical lever into an optical pulse
recorder. Consisting of a pair of drums over which revolved a continuous
paper band driven by clockwork, this device picked up movements in
the plant which were translated through a movable lever attached to a
set of mirrors which reflected a beam of light onto the paper. The
excursion of the shifting spot of light, followed by means of a sliding
inkwell with an ink sponge protruding from it, made visible for the first
time movements in plant organs which had thus far remained hidden
to the scientific world.

With the aid of this instrument, Bose was able to show how the skins
of lizards, tortoises, and frogs as well as those of grapes, tomatoes, and
other fruits and vegetables behaved similarly. He found that the vegetal
digestive organs in insectivorous plants, from the tentacle of a sundew
to the hair-lined flap of a pitcher plant, were analogous to animal stom¬
achs. He discovered close parallels between the response to light in
leaves and in the retinas of animal eyes. With his magnifier he proved
that plants become as fatigued by continuous stimulation as animal
muscles, whether they were hypersensitive mimosas or undemonstrative
radishes.

Working with the Desmodium gyrans, a species whose continuously
oscillating leaves recall the motion of semaphore flags and led to its

92 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

common appellation, telegraph plant, Bose found that the poison which
could stop its automatic ceaseless pulsation would also stop an animal
heart and that the antidote for this poison could bring both organisms
back to life.

Bose demonstrated the characteristics of a nerve system in mimosa,
a plant whose leaflets are symmetrically arranged on each leaf with
several leaves stemming from more or less the same point, the whole leaf
system borne on small branchlets or petioles issuing from the main stem.

When Bose electrically shocked the stem or touched it with a hot
wire, the base of the nearest petiole collapsed within seconds, to be
followed, after another interval, by the folding of the leaves at its end.
Connecting a galvanometer to the petiole, Bose recorded an electrical
disturbance between these two points of reaction. If he Louched the tip
of a leaf with a hot object, first the leaflets closed and then the base
segment drooped.

Bose interpreted these actions as due to electrical excitation, which,
in turn, produced mechanical responses; this was also what happened in
the animal nerve-muscle unit, where the nerve carried the electric im¬
pulse and the muscle contracted in response. Bose later proved that
identical results could be produced in both plant and animal systems by
cold, anesthesia, or the passage of a weak current.

Bose showed that in mimosa there exists the same kind of “reflex arc”
which causes us to withdraw our fingers instantly from a hot stove before
pain can be felt. When Bose touched the tip of one leaf on a three-leaf
petiole he saw that the leaflets of the disturbed leaf gradually closed,
starting from the tip; then the petiole collapsed; lastly, the other two
leaves closed from the base upward.

In Desmodium gyrans, or the telegraph plant, Bose found that if the
eut end of a detached leaflet was dipped in water in a bent glass tube
>t recovered from the shock of its amputation and began to pulsate anew.
Vas this not like an excised animal heart which can be kept beating in
Anger’s solution? Just as the heart stops beating when blood pressure
is owered and starts again when pressure is raised, Bose found the same

Was ^ rue ^ or ^ pulsation of the Desmodium when the sap pressure was
'ncreased or decreased.

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 93

Bose experimented with heat and cold to ascertain the optimal condi¬
tions under which plant movement was best elicited. One day he found
that when all motion stopped in his plant, it suddenly shuddered m a
way reminiscent of the death spasm in animals. To determine exactly
the critical temperature at which death occurred, he invented a moro-
graph, or death recorder. While many plants met their end at sixty
degrees Centigrade, individual plants exhibited variations depending on
their previous histories and ages. If their power of resistance was artifi¬
cially depressed by fatigue, or poison, the death spasm would take place
with temperatures as low as twenty-three degrees Centigrade. At death,
the plant threw off a huge electrical force. Five hundred green peas
could develop five hundred volts, said Bose, enough to fulminate a cook
but for the fact that peas are seldom connected in series.

Though it had been thought that plants liked unlimited quantities of
carbon dioxide, Bose found that too much of this gas could suffocate
them, but that they could then be revived, just like animals, with oxygen.
Like human beings, plants became intoxicated when given shots of
whiskey or gin, swayed like any barroom drunkard, passed out, and
eventually revived, with definite signs of a hangover. These findings
together with hundreds of other data were published in two massive

volumes in 1906 and 1907.

Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation ran to 781
pages and detailed 315 separate experiments. These went against an
entrenched notion, which Bose thus explained: “From the plausible
analogy of the firing off of a gun by pulling a trigger, or the action of
a combustion engine, it has been customary to suppose that all response
to stimulus must be of the nature of an explosive chemical change,
accompanied by an inevitable rundown of energy. Bose s experiments,
on the contrary, showed him that in plants their movement, the ascent
of their sap, and their growth were due to energy absorbed from their
surroundings, which they could hold latent or store for future use.

These revolutionary ideas, and especially the finding that plants ha
nerves, were received with veiled hostility among botanists. The Botam
cal Gazette commended Bose for a path-breaking achievement, but hel
that his book was “not without errors into which the author has fallen
by reason of some unfamiliarity with his materials.

94 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

Even as the botanists grumbled, Bose sent to the printer a second,
equally massive, volume, Comparative Electro-Physiology , setting forth
521 additional experiments; its findings also clashed with current teach¬
ing and doctrine. Instead of emphasizing the accepted wide range of
specific differences between the reactions of various plant and animal
tissues, Bose consistently pointed to a real continuity between them.
The nerve, universally held to be typically nonmotile, he showed capable
of indisputable movement, which could more delicately be ascertained
by mechanical than by electrical means. Whereas plants were consid¬
ered to lack all power of conducting true excitation, Bose showed they
were in fact possessed of this power.

Even more heretically, Bose held that the isolated vegetal nerve is
indistinguishable from animal nerve: “So complete, indeed, has that
Similarity between the responses of plant and animal, of which this is
an instance, been found,” wrote Bose, “that the discovery of a given
responsive characteristic in one case has proved a sure guide to its
observation in the other, and that the explanation of a phenomenon,
under the simpler conditions of the plant, has been found fully sufficient
for its elucidation under the more complex circumstances of the ani¬
mal.”

Going even further, Bose maintained that when electromotive inten¬
sity was above or below a certain range the law of polar effects of
Currents, established by Pfliiger, was overturned; in addition, a nervous
impulse, supposed to lie beyond any conceivable power of visual
scrutiny, attended by a change of form, was entirely capable of direct
observation.

The authoritative scientific magazine Nature, left gasping by both
volumes, wrote of the first: “In fact, the whole book abounds in interest¬
ing matter skillfully woven together and would be recommended as of
great value if it did not continually arouse our incredulity.” Of the
second, Nature was equally ambivalent in its attitude. “The student of
plant physiology,” said the reviewer, “who has some acquaintance with
the main classical ideas of his subject, will feel at first extreme bewilder¬
ment as he peruses this book. It proceeds so smoothly and logically, and
yet it does not start from any place in the existing ‘corpus* of knowledge,
*nd never attaches itself with any firm adherence. This effect of detach-

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 95

ment is heightened by the complete absence of precise reference to the
work of other investigators.” There were, of course, no other investiga¬
tors; and the reviewer, limited by the compartmentalized science of his
day, had no way of knowing he was dealing with a genius half a century
ahead of his time.

In a short statement Bose summed up lhis philosophy: “This vast
abode of nature is built in many wings, each with its own portal. The
physicist, the chemist and the biologist come in by different doors, each
one his own department of knowledge, and each comes to think that this
is his special domain unconnected with that of any other. Hence has
arisen our present division of phenomena into the worlds of inorganic,
vegetal and sentient. This philosophical attitude of mind may be denied.
We must remember that all inquiries have as their goal the attainment
of knowledge in its entirety.”

One of the blocks to the acceptance by plant physiologists of Bose’s
revolutionary findings was their inability to construct the delicate instru¬
ments he had devised. Yet the mounting opposition to his basic thesis
that responses in plants are similar to those due to the nervous system
of animals convinced Bose that he should develop an even more refined
set of instruments for automatic stimulation and recording of response.
He^therefore designed a resonant recorder, capable of measuring time
up to 1/1000 of a second, to make rapid movement in plants apparent,
and an oscillating recorder to reveal the slowest movement in plants.

With the assistance of his new recorder Bose got results on the
nervous impulse so convincing that this time they were published in the
Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. In the same year Bose pub¬
lished his third massive volume of experimentation, Researches in Irrita -
bility of Plants; 376 pages; 180 experiments.

In 1914, Bose left for Europe on a fourth scientific mission, this time
carrying not only his various instruments but specimens of Mimosa
pudica and Desmodium gyrans to illustrate his lectures. In England he
demonstrated before audiences at Oxford and Cambridge how a plant
touched on one side would shiver and react on the other. He addressed
evening meetings of both the Royal Institution and the Royal Society
of Medicine, where Sir Lauder Brunton, who had made experiments on

96 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

■ f insectivorous plants for Charles Darwin in 1875, remarked that all the
| subsequent physiological experimentation he had seen since then was

crude in comparison with yours in which you show what a marvellous
resemblance there is between the reactions of plants and animals.”

/ The ve § etarian an d antivivisectionist George Bernard Shaw, having
^witnessed in Bose’s laboratory, through one of Bose’s magnifiers, a cab¬
bage leaf going through violent paroxysms as it was scalded to death,
i dedicated his own collected works to Bose, inscribing them: “Prom the
^ least to the greatest living biologist.” A repentant animal physiologist
* v who had cast the single vote preventing publication of plant research by
; = the Royal Society came up to Bose to confess his misdeed and said, “I
•could not believe that such things were possible and thought your
Mental imagination had led you astray. Now, I fully confess that you

have been right all along.” Bose, letting bygones be bygones, never
f divulged his name.

* Bose s research was for the first time vividly recorded for the public
in the British publication Nation:

M X'

j In a room near Maida Vale there is an unfortunate carrot strapped to

?- £ „ table ° f . an unlicensed vivisector. Wires pass through two glass tubes

ull of a white substance; they are like two legs, whose feet are buried in
the flesh of the carrot. When the vegetable is pinched with a pair of
forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls

' tbe ‘ ong arm a ver Y delicate level which actuates a tiny mirror. This
r r casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus
' ■ v ^ nor mously exaggerates the tremor of the carrot. A pinch near the right-
. hand tube sends the beam seven or eight feet to the right, and a stab near
, t e other wire sends it far to the left. Thus can science reveal the feelings
of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot,

■ ( ij

The acclaim which came in the British Isles was repeated in Vienna,
'vhere it was the consensus of eminent German and Austrian scientists
^ at Calcutta was far ahead of us in these new lines of investigation.”

Back in India, where the governor of Bengal had arranged for a huge
ijneeting, headed by the sheriff of Calcutta to greet him, Bose spoke of
pursuit, under extreme difficulty, of his investigation of the extraor¬
dinary slowness of growth in plants. To conceive of this it is only

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 97

necessary to state that if the annual growth of a tree is liberally estimated
to be five feet, it would take one thousand years to cover a mile.

In 1917, at a huge meeting of students held to honor the knighthood
bestowed upon Bose, the chairman remarked that he should be looked
upon not as a mere discoverer of scientific truths, but as a Yuga Pravar.
tak, or one who has brought about a new epoch of synthesis in scientific
development. This compliment was to Bose small music compared to
the opening of his own Institute for Research on the thirtieth of Novem¬
ber, on the occasion of his fifty-ninth birthday.

During his speech at the ceremony, Bose, who had declined to patent
the device which could have made him, instead of Marconi, the inventor
of wireless telegraphy, and had consistently resisted the blandishments
of industrial representatives to turn his ideas into profits, stated that it
was his particular desire that any discoveries made at his new institute
would become public property and that no patents would ever be taken
out on them. “Not in matter, but in thought, not in possessions, but in
ideas, are to be found the seeds of immortality,” Bose told the assembled
crowd. “Not through material acquisitions, but in generous diffusion of
ideas can the true empire of humanity be established. Thus, the spirit
of our national culture demands that we should forever be free from the
desire of utilizing knowledge for personal gain.”

A year after the foundation of the institute, Bose convened a meeting,
sponsored by the governor of Bengal, to announce that, after eight years
of struggle, he had finally been able to devise a brand-new instrument,
the crescograph. Through the use of two levers, this extraordinary inven¬
tion not only produced a ten-thousand-fold magnification of movement,
far beyond the powers of the strongest microscope, but could automati¬
cally record the rate of growth of plants and their changes in a period
as short as a minute,

With this instrument Bose showed the remarkable fact that in count¬
less plants, growth proceeds in rhythmic pulses, each pulse exhibiting a
rapid uplift and then a slower partial recoil of about a fourth the distance
gained. The pulses in Calcutta averaged about three per minute. By
watching the progress of the movement on the chart of his new inven¬
tion, Bose found that growth in some plants could be retarded and even

98 PIONEERS OK PLANT MYSTERIES

jilted by merely touching them, and that in others rough handling
stimulated growth, especially if they were sluggish and morose.

To determine a method which would allow him instantly to show the
acceleration or retardation of a plant’s growth in response to a stimulant,
gose now devised what he called a “balanced crescograph,” which would
allow the plant to be lowered at the same rate at which it was growing
upward, thus reducing the marking of its growth on the chart to a
horizontal line and allowing any changes in the rate to express them¬
selves as curves. The method was so extremely sensitive that Bose was
able to detect variation of the rate of growth as hyper-minimal as 1/1500
millionths of an inch per second.

In America, Scientific American, referring to the significance of
Bose’s findings for agriculture, wrote: “What is the tale of Aladdin and
his wonderful lamp compared to the possibilities of Dr. Bose’s Cresco¬
graph? In less than a quarter of an hour the action of fertilizers, food,
electric currents and various stimulants can be fully determined.”

Bose also elucidated the mysteries of tropistic movements in plants,
or their tendency to move in response to an external stimulus. At the
time of his research, botanists could no more explain these tropisms than
could Moliere’s medical student who passed his exam by answering the
question “Why does opium make one sleep?” with the tautology “Be¬
cause it has a dormitive virtue.”

The roots of plants are called “geotropic,” because they burrow into
the soil. Because their shoots flee the earth they are said to be imbued
with “negative geotropism.” To heighten this nonsense, branches are
said to start out laterally from the shoot by “diageotropism.” Leaves turn
to light because they are “heliotropic” or “phototropic.” If, disobeying
this rule, they turn away from light, then they are “negatively photo¬
tropic.” Roots questing water are described as “hydrotropic,” and those
Bending against the flow of a stream “rheotropic.” The tendril’s touch
'$ known as its “thigmotropism.”

As the botanist Sir Patrick Geddes wrote: “Intellectual activities have
their verbalisms, their confusions and misdirections and these may also
Cumulate into what are practically diseases. Every science, of course,
ne eds its technical terminology but all have suffered from the verbosity

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 99

1

of nomenclatures and, notoriously, botanv most of all. Thus apart from
the systematic names for each and every species and order which are of
course indispensable—there are some fifteen or twenty thousand techni-
cal terms in the botanical dictionaries of which many have survived into
modern textbooks to the perplexity of the student. In an essay, com¬
menting on the strange power of big words like “heliotropism,” Bose
said that they usually acted like some malevolent magic to kill curiosity.

Though it was beginning to be finally accepted that plants did possess
conducting tissue analogous to animal nerve, it was now urged by plant
specialists that the sensibility of plants was, if it did in fact exist, of 3
very low order. Bose demonstrated that this was not the case.

He showed the tropism exhibited by tendrils to be the result of two
fundamental reactions: a direct stimulus inducing contraction and an
indirect stimulus causing expansion. In the curvature of the plant organ,
the convex side was electrically positive, the concave side negative. Since
the human organ most readily available and most sensitive to the percep¬
tion of electric current is the tip of the tongue, Bose decided to match
its detective ability against that of the sensitive leaflet of the Biophytum
plant. Hooking up a tongue and a leaflet, he passed a current through
both organs, gradually increasing the amperage. When the current
reached an intensity of 1.5 micro-amperes, or 1 1/2 millionths of the
standard electrical unit of current, the leaflet shimmered in response but
the overrated tongue had nothing to relate about the current until the
intensity had been increased threefold.

With the same instrumentation, Bose showed that plants of all kinds
are sensitive. He found “a stoutish tree will give its response in a slow
and lordly fashion whereas a thin one attains the acme of its excitement

in an incredibly short time.”

During Bose’s trip to London and Europe in 1919 and 1920, the
distinguished scientist Professor John Arthur Thomson wrote in the
New Statesman: “It is in accordance with the genius of India that the
investigator should press further towards unity than we have yet hinte
at, should seek to correlate responses and memory expression in th £
living with their analogs in organic matter, and should see in anticipation
the lines of Physics and Physiology and of Psychology converging an

100 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

meeting These are questionings of a prince of experimenters whom we
ar e proud to welcome in our midst today.”

The usually reserved Times wrote: “While we in England were still
steeped in the rude empiricism of barbaric life, the subtle Easterner had
swept the universe into a synthesis and had seen the one in all its
changing manifestations.” But even those bold statements and the an¬
nouncement that Bose was to be made a fellow of the Royal Society,
j n May, 1920, could not stem the all-too-familiar intimations of the
doubters and pedants. Bose’s old adversary Professor Waller, upsetting
the general atmosphere of cordiality and recognition, wrote to the Times
to question the reliability of Bose’s magnetic crescograph and to ask for
a demonstration of it in a physiological laboratory before experts. When
the demonstration, which took place at London University on April 23,
1920, was a complete success, Lord Rayleigh joined with several col¬
leagues in a letter to the Times stating: “We are satisfied that the growth
of plant tissues is correctly recorded by this instrument and at magnifica¬
tion of one million to more than ten million times.”

Bose wrote to the Times on May 5:

Criticism which transgresses the limit of fairness must inevitably hinder
the progress of knowledge. My special investigations have by their nature
presented extraordinary difficulties. I regret to say that during a period of
twenty years, these difficulties have been greatiy aggravated by misrepre¬
sentation and worse. The obstacles deliberately placed in my path I can
now ignore and forget. If the result of my work, by upsetting any particu¬
lar theory, has aroused the hostility here and there of an individual, I can
take comfort in the warm welcome which has been extended to me by
the great body of scientific men in this country.

During still another trip to Europe in 1923, the year that saw the
Publication of Bose’s detailed 227-page work The Physiology of the
Ascent of Sap, the French philosopher Henri Bergson said, after hearing
Bose lecture at the Sorbonne: “The dumb plants had by Bose’s marvel¬
ous inventions been rendered the most eloquent witnesses of their hith-
er to unexpressed life story. Nature has at last been forced to yield her
’Oust jealously guarded secrets.” More Gallicly humorous, Le Matin
stated: “After this discovery we begin to have misgivings, when we strike

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 101

a woman with a blossom, which of them suffers more, the woman or the
flower?”

In 1924 and 1926 there appeared two more volumes of experiments
totaling more than five hundred pages: The Physiology of Photosynthesif
and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants. In 1926 Bose was nominated
a member of the League of Nations Committee on Intercultural Coop,
eration, along with a physicist, Albert Einstein, a mathematician, H. A.
Lorentz, and a Greek literary scholar, Gilbert Murray. The assignment
had the advantage of taking Bose to Europe annually. Still the Indian
Government had to be jolted into awareness of the importance of Bose’s
work. In 1926 Sir Charles Sherrington, president of the Royal Society,
Lord Rayleigh, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Julian Huxley all signed a
memorial to the Viceroy of India pleading for the expansion of the
institute.

Back in Europe in 1927, the year which saw the appearance of his
Plant Autographs and Their Revelations , Bose was presented by Romain
Rolland with a signed copy of his new novel, Jean Christophe, inscribed
“To the Revealer of a New World.” Later, comparing Bose to Siegfried,
who had learned the language of birds, Rolland said: “In the European
scientist the steeling of the mind to the interpretation of nature has
pften been accompanied by a withering of the feeling for beauty. Dar¬
win bitterly lamented the fact that his research in biology had com¬
pletely atrophied his appreciation of poetry. With Bose it is otherwise.’’

In 1928, the same year that Bose brought out his last book, the
429-page Motor Mechanisms of Plants, one of the greatest plant physi¬
ologists of modern times, Professor Hans Molisch of Vienna, decided,
after hearing Bose lecture in the Austrian capital, to go to India and
work with the Bengali. Before leaving the subcontinent he wrote to
Nature: “I saw the plant writing down its rate of assimilation of gaseous
food. I also observed the speed of the impulse of the excitement in plants
being recorded by the resonant recorder. All these are more wonderful
than fairytales.”

All his life Bose had stressed to a scientific community steeped in a
mechanistic and materialistic outlook, and increasingly divided and sub¬
divided into specialized cubbyholes, the idea that all of nature pulsed

jyjth life and that each of the interrelated entities in the natural kingdom
might reveal untold secrets could man but learn how to communicate
^ith them. In the lecture hall of his institute, under a bronze, silver, and
gpld relief of the Hindu sun god rising in his chariot for his daily cosmic
fjght against the powers of darkness—which Bose had first seen depicted
in an ancient cave fresco at Ajanta—Bose, now in retirement, summed
u p his scientific philosophy.

In my investigations on the action of forces on matter, I was amazed
to find boundary lines vanishing and to discover points of contact emerg¬
ing between the Living and the non-Living. My first work in the region
of invisible lights made me realize how in the midst of luminous ocean
we stood almost blind. Just as in following light from visible to invisible
our range of investigation transcends our physical sight, so also the prob¬
lem of the great mystery of Life and Death is brought a little nearer
solution, when, in the realm of the Living, we pass from the Voiced to
the Unvoiced.

Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant
world? The question is not one of speculation but of actual demonstration
by some method that is unimpeachable. This means that we should
■ abandon all our preconceptions, most of which are afterward found to be
absolutely groundless and contrary to facts. The final appeal must be
made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless it bears
the plant’s own signature.

102 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

Plant Life Magnified 100 Million Times 103

The Metamorphosis

of Plants

Why botany, a potentially fascinating subject dealing with plants, living
and extinct, their uses, classification, anatomy, physiology, geographical
distribution, should have been from the beginning reduced to a dull
taxonomy, an endless Latin dirge, in which progress is measured more
by the number of corpses cataloged than by the number of blossoms
cherished, is perhaps the greatest mystery in the study of plant life-
While young botanists still struggle today through the jungles of
Central Africa and along the Amazon in search of polysyllabic victims
to add to the 3 50,000 already on the books, what makes plants live, ° r
why, does not appear to be the purview of the science, nor has it bee®

ince the fourth century b.c. when Theophrastus, the Lesbian disciple
yQ { Aristotle, first cataloged a couple of hundred species in his nine books

. L t

• On the History of Plants and six On the Causes of Plants. The Christian
era merely raised the rolls to four hundred medicinal plants with the
publication of De Materia Medica by a Greek physician to the Roman
' army, Dioscorides, shortly after the Crucifixion, an event which put the
quietus on the subject for another thousand years. Throughout the Dark
Ages, the books of Theophrastus and Dioscorides remained the standard
texts in botany. Even though the Renaissance brought aesthetics into
the field, with lovely woodcuts in large herbals such as those of Hierony-
tnus Bock, it could not rip botany from the rigorous grip of the taxono¬
mist.

: By 1583 a Florentine, Andreas Caesalpinus, had classified 1,520
plants into fifteen classes, distinguished by seed and fruit. He was fol¬
lowed by the Frenchman Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who described
‘some 8,000 species of plants in twenty-two classes, chiefly according to
the form of corolla—the colored petals of the flower. This brought sex
into the picture. Although Herodotus had reported almost half a millen-
'nium before Christ that the Babylonians distinguished two sorts of
palms, and would sprinkle the pollen from one onto the flower of the
other in order to secure the production of fruit, it was not till the end
of the seventeenth century that it was realized that plants were sexual
creatures with a flourishing sex life of their own.

The first botanist to demonstrate that flowering plants have sex and
r 4hat pollen is necessary for fertilization and seed formation was a Ger¬
man, Rudolf Jakob Camerarius, a professor of medicine and director of
Tithe botanical gardens at Tubingen, who published his De Sexu Plan-
Jfforum Epistula in 1694. The idea that there could be a sexual difference
? in plants caused general astonishment, and Camerarius’ theory was
ffiercely combated by the current establishment. It was considered ‘‘the
jMdest and most singular invention that ever evolved from a poet’s
Vtnind.” A heated controversy lasted almost a generation before it was
^finally established that plants had sexual organs and could therefore be
jf&levated to a higher sphere of creation.

^ Even so, that plants have female organs in the form of vulva, vagina,

The Metamorphosis of Plants 105

uterus, and ovaries, serving precisely the same functions as they do in
woman, as well as distinct male organs in the form of penis, glans, and
testes, designed to sprinkle the air with billions of spermatozoa, were
facts quickly covered by the eighteenth-century establishment with an
almost impenetrable veil of Latin nomenclature, which stigmatized the
labiate vulva, and mis-styled the vagina; the former being called
“stigma,” the latter “style.” Penis and glans were equally disfigured into
"filament” and “anther.”

Whereas plants had been going through countless millennia of im¬
provement to their sexual organs, often in the face of staggering climatic
changes, and had invented the most ingenious methods for fecundating
each other and for spreading their fertile seed, students of botany, who
might have delighted in the sexuality of plants, were frustrated by such
terms as “stamens” for the male and “pistils” for the female organs.
Schoolchildren might have been fascinated to learn that each com
kernel on a cob in summer is a separate ovule, that each strand on the
pubic corn silk tufted around the cob is an individual vagina ready to
suck up the pollen sperm brought to it on the wind, that it may wriggle
the entire length of the stylized vagina to impregnate each kernel on the
cob, that every single seed produced on a plant is the result of a separate
independent impregnation. Instead of struggling with archaic nomen¬
clature, teenagers might be interested to learn that each pollen grain
impregnates but one womb, which contains but one seed, that a capsule
of tobacco contains, on an average, 2,500 seeds, which require 2,500
impregnations, all of which must be effected within a period of 24 hours
in a space less than one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. Instead of using
the wonders of nature to stimulate the budding minds of their pupils,
Victorian teachers misused the birds and the bees to denature their own
sexuality.

How many universities even now draw the parallel between the her¬
maphroditic nature of plants, which bear both penis and vagina in the
same body, with the “ancient wisdom” which relates that man is de¬
scended from an androgynous predecessor? The ingenuity of some
plants in avoiding self-fertilization is uncanny. Some kinds of palm trees
even bear staminate flowers one year and pistillate the next. Whereas

106 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

in grasses and cereals cross-fertilization is insured by the action of the
wind, most other plants are cross-fertilized by birds and insects. Like
animals and women, flowers exude a powerful and seductive odor when
ready for mating. This causes a multitude of bees, birds, and butterflies
to join in a Saturnalian rite of fecundation. Flowers that remain unfertil¬
ized emit a strong fragrance for as many as eight days or until the flower
withers and falls; yet once impregnated, the flower ceases to exude its
fragrance, usually in less than half an hour. As in humans, sexual frustra¬
tion can gradually turn fragrance into fetor. Similarly, when a plant is
ready for impregnation, there is an evolution of heat in the female organ.
This was first noted by the celebrated French botanist Adolphe Theo¬
dore Brongniart in examining a flower of the Colocasia odorata, a
tropical plant grown in greenhouses for the beauty of its foliage. This
plant, at the time of flowering, presents an increase of temperature that
Brongniart compared to an attack of fever, repeating the phenomenon
for six days, daily from three to six in the afternoon. At the proper time
for impregnation Brongniart found that a small thermometer fastened
to the female organ marked a temperature eleven degrees Centigrade
higher than any other part of the plant.

The pollen of most plants has a highly inflammable character; when
thrown on a red-hot surface it will ignite as quickly as gunpowder.
Artificial lightning was formerly produced on the theatrical stage by
throwing the pollen grains of the Lycopodium or club mosses onto a hot
shovel. In many plants the pollen diffuses an odor bearing the most
striking resemblance to the seminal emission of animals and man. Pol¬
len, which performs the same function in almost precisely the same
manner as does the semen of animals and men, enters the folds of the
plant vulva and traverses the whole length of the vagina, until it enters
the ovary and comes in contact with the ovule. Pollen tubes elongate
themselves by a most remarkable process. As with animals and humans,
the sexuality of certain plants is guided by taste. The spermatozoa of
certain mosses carried in the morning dew in search of females, is guided
by its taste for malic acid toward the delicate cups at the bottom of
which lie moss eggs to be fertilized. The spermatozoa of ferns, on the
other hand, liking sugar, find their females in pools of sweetened water.

The Metamorphosis of Plants 107

Camerarius’ discovery of sex in plants set tfe stage for the generator
of systematic botany, Carl von Linne, who dabbed the corolla petals
“curtains of the nuptial bed.” A Swede, wha latinized his name to
Linnaeus from a favorite linden tree while studying for the priesthood,

he divided the plant world into species principally on the basis of
variations in the male sexual organ or pollenoearing stamens of each
plant. With his penchant for looking, Linnaeus recognized some six
thousand different species of plants. His system, referred to as the
“sexual system,” was considered “a great stimulus to students of
botany.” But his monumental method of latinized classification turned
out to be as sterile as that of any voyeur who only looks at bodies. Still
in use today under the unwieldy title of “binomial nomenclature,” the
system grants to each plant a Latin name for species and genus, to which
is added the name of the person responsible for first naming it; thus the
garden pea you eat with chops is the Pisum sativum Linnaeum.

This mania for registration was but a hangover of scholasticism. As
Raoul France, true lover of plants, described Linne’s efforts, “Wherever
he went the laughing brook died, the glory of the flowers withered, the
grace and joy of the meadows was transformed into withered corpses
whose crushed and discolored bodies were described in a thousand
minute Latin terms. The blooming fields and the storied woods disap¬
peared during a botanical hour into a dusty herbarium, into a dreary
catalogue of Greek and Latin labels. It became the hour for the practice
of tiresome dialectic, filled with discussions about the number of sta¬
mens, the shape of leaves, all of which we learnt only to forget. When
the work was over we stood disenchanted and estranged from nature.

To break away from this taxonomania, to put life and love and sex
back into the plant world, took real poetic genius. In September of 1786,
eight years after the death of Linnaeus, a tall, handsome man of thirty-
seven, extremely attractive to women, who had been spending his holi¬
days at Karlsbad taking the waters and strolling with the ladies in the
woods on long botanical expeditions, suddenly rebelled against the
whole system. “Secretly and stealthily” he abandoned mistress and
friends to go south toward the Alps. Incognito, with only his servant
aware that they were heading for das Land wo die Citronen bluehen,

108 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

the traveler, in real life privy councilor and director of mines for the
Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was delighted at the beauty and variety of the
southern vegetation beyond the Brenner Pass. This secret trip to Italy,
the culmination of years of longing, was to constitute a climax in the
life of Germany's greatest poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

On his way to Venice he stopped to visit the botanical gardens of the
University of Padua. Strolling among the luxuriant verdure, most of
which grew only in hothouses in his native Germany, Goethe was
overcome with a sudden poetic vision; it was to give him insight into
the very nature of plants. It was also to give him a place in the history
of science as the precursor of Darwin’s theory of organic development,
an achievement as little appreciated by his compeers as it was extolled
by a later generation. The great biologist Ernst Haeckel considered
Goethe to stand with Jean Lamarck “at the head of all the great philoso¬
phers of nature who first established a theory of organic development,
and who are the illustrious fellow workers of Darwin.” For years Goethe
had been distressed by the limitations involved in a merely analytical and
intellectual approach to the plant world, typified by the cataloging mind
of the eighteenth century, and of a theory of physics, then triumphant,
which submitted the world to blind laws of mechanics, to a “jeu de
rouages et de ressorts sans vie. ”

While still at the university in Leipzig, Goethe had rebelled against
an arbitrary division of knowledge into faculties which cut up science
into rival disciplines. In Goethe's nostrils university science had the
stench of a corpse whose limbs have rotted apart. Disgusted at the petty
contradictions of university savants, the young poet, whose early verses
glowed with a passionate delight in nature, sought knowledge elsewhere,
avidly studying galvanism and mesmerism and pursuing the electrical
experiments of Winkler. Already as a child he had been fascinated by
the phenomena of electricity and magnetism, struck by the extraordi¬
nary phenomenon of polarity. Cured in his late teens of a dangerous
throat infection by a Rosicrucian doctor, Johann Friedrich Metz, Goe¬
the was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to apprehend the tremen¬
dous secret displayed all around him in constant creation and annihila¬
tion; he was thus led to books on mysticism and alchemy in pursuit of

The Metamorphosis of Plants 109

the secret forces of nature. There he discovered Paracelsus, Jakob
Boehme, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and Gottfried Arnold.

To Goethe's delight he found magic and alchemy “quite other than
obscure superstitious practices with the object of creating illusion or
malefice.” It was then, according to Christian Lepinte, author of Goethe
et Voccultisme, that Goethe began “to aspire with all his strength to
shatter the framework of a mechanized universe, to find the living
science capable of revealing to him the ultimate secret of nature." From
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, or Para¬
celsus, Goethe learned that the occult, because it deals with living reality
and not dead catalogs, might come closer to the truth than science, and
that the sage unveiling the secrets of nature was not necessarily profan-

L

ing a forbidden sanctuary but might be walking in the footsteps of
divinity, a person privileged to look deeply into the mystery of souls and
of cosmic forces.

Above all, Goethe learned that the treasures of nature are not discov¬
ered by one who is not in sympathy with nature. He realized that the
normal techniques of botany could not get near to the living being of
a plant as an organism in a cycle of growth. Some other form of looking
was needed which could unite itself with the life of the plant. To obtain
a clearer picture of a plant, Goethe would tranquilize himself at night
before going to sleep by visualizing the entire cycle of a plant's develop¬
ment through its various stages from seed to seed. In the splendid ducal
gardens at Weimar, in the Gartenhaus quarters given to him by the
Duke, Goethe developed an acute interest in living plants, an interest
which was sharpened by his friendship with the sole local apothecary,
Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Buchholz, who kept a garden of medicinal
herbs and plants of special interest and with whom Goethe built up a
private botanical garden.

In the grander botanical gardens of Padua, where Paracelsus had
preceded him, Goethe was most impressed by a high, broad wall of fiery
red bells, Bignonia radicans, that glowed enchantingly. He was also
attracted by a palm because he was able to discern in its fanlike quality
a complete development from the simple lance-shaped leaves near the
ground, through successive separations, up to a spatulate sheaf where a
branchlet of blossoms emerged, strangely unrelated to the preceding

110 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

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growth. From the observation of this complex series of transitional forms
Goethe obtained the inspiration for what was to become his doctrine
of the metamorphosis of plants. In a flash he realized what had been
accumulating in his mind through long years of association with plants:
the fan palm showed clear, living proof that all the lateral outgrowths
of the plant were simply variations of a single structure: the leaf.*
Goethe saw that propagation and prolification of one organ into another
was simply a process of metamorphosis. He saw that each organ though

outwardly changed from a similarity to a dissimilarity had a virtual inner
identity.

At Goethe s request the Padua gardener cut from the fan palm an
entire sequence of modifications which Goethe carried away with him
in several pasteboard containers, where they lasted several years. As for
the palm tree, it still stands in the Padua botanical gardens despite
numerous intervening wars and revolutions.

With his new way of looking at plants Goethe came to the conclusion
that nature, by bringing forth one part through another, could achieve
the most diversified forms through modification of a single organ. “The
variation of plant forms, whose unique course I had long been following,
now awakened in me more and more the idea that the plant forms round
about us are not predetermined, but are happily mobile and flexible,
enabling them to adapt to the many conditions throughout the world,
which influence them, and to be formed and re-formed with them.”

Goethe also recognized that the process of development and refine¬
ment of form in plants worked through a threefold cycle of expansion
and contraction. The expansion of foliage was followed by a contraction
into calyx and bracts; there followed a splendid expansion into the petals
of the corolla and a contraction into the meeting point of stamen and
stigma; finally there came a swelling into fruit followed by a contraction

into seed. This six-step cycle completed, the essential plant was ready
to start all over again.

Ernst Lehrs' thoughtful evaluation of Goethe in Man or Matter says

*Sir George Trevelyan in a chapter on Goethe's plant metamorphosis in his forthcom¬
ing book on architecture, points out that by “leaf” Goethe did not mean the stem leaf,
which is itself a manifestation of the basic organ. Some other word, says Trevelyan, is
needed, such as “phyllome,” to imply the archetypal ideal organ which underlies every
organ of the plant and is able to transfer one part into another.

The Metamorphosis of Plants 111

that another natural principle is implicit in this cycle for which Goethe
did not coin a specific term, “although he shows through other utter¬
ances that he was well aware of it, and of its universal significance for
all life.’' Lehrs calls this principle that of renunciation.

In the life of the plant this principle shows itself most conspicuously
where the green leaf is heightened into the flower. While progressing
from leaf to flower the plant undergoes a decisive ebb in its vitality.
Compared with the leaf, the flower is a dying organ. This dying, however,
is of a kind we may aptly call a “dying into being. Life in its mere
vegetative form is here seen withdrawing in order that a higher manifesta¬
tion of the spirit may take place. The same principle can be seen at work
in the insect kingdom when the caterpillar’s tremendous vitality passes
over into the short-lived beauty of the butterfly. In the human being it
is responsible for that metamorphosis or organic process which occurs on
the path from the metabolic to the nervous system, and which we came
to recognize as the precondition for the appearance of consciousness

within the organism.

Lehrs marvels at the powerful forces which must be at work in the
plant organism at the point of transition from its green to its colored
parts. They enforce, says Lehrs, a complete halt upon the juices that rise
up right into the calyx, so that these bring nothing of their life-bearing
activity into the formation of the flower, but undergo a complete trans¬
mutation, not gradually, but with a sudden leap.

After achieving its masterpiece in the flower, the plant once more goes
through a process of withdrawal, this time into the tiny organs of fertiliza¬
tion. After fertilization, the fruit begins to swell: once more the plant
produces an organ with a more or less conspicuous spatial extension. This
is followed by a final and extreme contraction in the forming of the seed
inside the fruit. In the seed the plant gives up all outer appearance to such
a degree that nothing seems to remain but a small, insignificant speck of
organized matter. Yet this tiny, inconspicuous thing bears in it the power
of bringing forth a whole new plant.

Lehrs points out that in its three successive rhythms of expansion and
contraction the plant reveals the basic rule of its existence.

During each expansion, the active principle of the plant presses forth
into visible appearance; during each contraction it withdraws from outer
embodiment into what we may describe as a more formless pure state of
being. We thus find the spiritual principle of the plant engaged in a kind

112 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

of breathing rhythm, now appearing, now disappearing, now assuming
power over matter; now withdrawing from it again.

Goethe saw in the changeableness of all the external characteristics
of plants nothing but appearance; he drew the conclusion that the
nature of the plant was not to be found in these characteristics, but had
to be sought at a deeper level. The thought became more and more alive
in him that it might be possible to develop all plants from a single one.
This small conceit was destined to transform the science of botany,
indeed the whole concept of the world: with it came the idea of evolu¬
tion. Metamorphosis was to become the key to the whole alphabet of
nature. But, whereas Darwin was to assume that external influences, like
mechanical causes, work upon the nature of an organism and modify it
accordingly, to Goethe the single alterations were various expressions of
the archetypal organism (Urorganismus), which possesses within itself
the capacity to take on manifold forms, and which at a particular time
takes on that form which is best suited to the conditions of the external
environing world. Goethe’s Urorganismus is a sort of Platonic idea in
the eye of the created mind.

Aristotle’s philosophy teaches that, besides original matter, another
principle is necessary to complete the triune nature of every particle,
and this is form: an invisible, but still, in an ontological sense of the
word, a substantial being, really distinct from matter proper. Thus, as
the theosophist Helena Blavatsky interprets Aristotle, in an animal or
a plant, besides the bones, the flesh, the nerves, the brains, and the
blood, in the former, and besides the pulpy matter, tissues, fibers, and
juice in the latter, there must be a substantial form, which Aristotle
named, in the horse, the horse’s soul; which Proclus identified as the
demon of every mineral, plant, or animal; and which was later catego¬
rized by medieval philosophers as the elementary spirits of the four
kingdoms.

Trevelyan explains the kernel of Goethe’s philosophy as lying in a
metaphysical concept of nature.

The godhead is at work in the living, not in the dead; it is present in
everything in the process of development and transformation, not in what
has already taken shape and rigidified. Thus, reason in its strivings towards
the divine is concerned with putting to use what has already developed
and grown torpid.

The Metamorphosis of Plants 113

Seeing that every part of the plant is a metamorphosis of the arche¬
typal "leaf" organ, Goethe came to the conception of an archetypal
plant, or Ur-pflanze, a supersensible force capable of developing into
myriad different forms. This, says Trevelyan, is no single plant, but a
force that holds the potentiality of every plant form within it.

All plants are thus seen as specific manifestations of the archetypal
plant which controls the entire plant kingdom and gives the value to
nature’s artistry in creating forms. It is in ceaseless play within the world
of plant form, capable of moving backwards and forwards, up and down,
in and out, through the scale of forms,

Summing up his discovery, Goethe asked, “If all plants were not
modeled on one pattern, how could I recognize that they are plants?"
Filled with delight, Goethe declared he could now invent plant forms,
even if they had never been realized on earth before.

From Naples Goethe wrote to his friend and fellow poet in Weimar,
Johann Gottfried von Herder: “I must tell you confidentially that I am
very close to the secret of the creation of plants, and that it is the
simplest thing one could imagine. The archetypal plant will be the
strangest creature in the world, which nature herself ought to envy me.
With this model and the key to it, one can invent plants endlessly which
mpst be consistent—that is, if they did not exist, yet they could exist,
and not some artistic or poetic shadows and appearances but possessing
inner truth and inevitability. The same law can be applied to everything
living." Goethe now pursued the idea “with joy and ecstasy, lovingly
immersing myself in it in Naples and Sicily,” applying the idea to every
plant he saw, writing reports to Herder on what took place “with as
much enthusiasm as was manifested over the finding of the lost silver
piece in the gospel parable.”

For two years Goethe observed, collected, studied phenomena in
detail, made many sketches and accurate drawings. “I pursued my
botanical studies, into which I was guided, driven, forced—and then
held captive by my interest.” Back in Germany after two years in Italy,
Goethe found that the new vision of life he had acquired was incompre¬
hensible to his fellow countrymen.

114 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

From Italy, rich m forms, I was plunged back into formless Ger¬
many, exchanging a sunny sky for a gloomy one. My friends, instead
, “ comforting me and drawing me back to them, drove me to despair.

| My . dell f ht m thin 8 s rei "ote and almost unknown to them, my sorrow

| and grief over what I had lost, seemed to offend them. I received no

j empathy, no one understood my language. I could not adjust myself

| to this distressing situation, so great was the loss to which my exterior

I senses must become reconciled. But gradually my spirit returned and

i sought to preserve itself intact.

I Goethe set his thoughts on paper in a first essay, “On the Metamor-
| phosis of Plants," in which he traced “the manifold specific phenomena
I in the magnificent garden of the universe back to one simple general
| principle " and stressed nature's method of “producing in accord with
definite laws, a living structure that is a model of everything artistic.”
The essay, which was to generate the science of morphology in plants,
was written in an unusual style, different from contemporary scientific
writings in that it did not pursue each idea to its full conclusion but, in
a cryptic manner, left room for interpretation. “Well satisfied with my

L roc ^J ure > sa y s Goethe, I was flattered to believe myself auspiciously

launched on a career in science. But the same thing happened to me

^ at * ^ad experienced in purely literary work; once more, at the very
^outset, 1 was repulsed.”

Goethe’s regular publisher refused the manuscript, telling him he was
literary man, not a scientist. Goethe found it hard to understand why
the publisher would not print the brochure when, “merely by risking six
Sheets of paper at the very most he might have retained for himself a
yolific, reliable, easily satisfied author, who was just getting a fresh
k "rt" When the brochure was printed elsewhere Goethe was further
urprised to find it completely ignored by botanist and public alike.

r ??^ T pui ? Ilc t said Goethe] demand that every man remain in his own
held. Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be united,
eople forgot that science had developed from poetry and they failed to
take into consideration that a swing of the pendulum might beneficently
reunite the two, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.

The Metamorphosis of Plants 115

Goethe then made the mistake of giving away copies of the brochure
to friends outside his immediate circle. These friends, said he, were by
no means tactful in their comments.

No one dared to accommodate himself to my method of expressing
myself. It is most tormenting not to be understood when one feels sure
himself, after a great stress and strain, that one understands both one’s
self and one’s subject. It drove one to insanity to hear repeated again and
again a mistake from which one has himself just escaped by a hair’s
breadth, and nothing is more painful than to have the things that should
unite us with informed and intelligent men give rise instead to un¬
bridgeable separation.

To his newly acquired friend and fellow poet Johann Christoph Fried¬
rich von Schiller, Goethe gave a spirited explanation of his theory of the
metamorphosis of plants, with graphic pen sketches of a symbolic plant.

He listened and looked with great interest, with unerring comprehen¬
sion, but when I had ended he shook his head, saying: ‘That is not an
experience, that is an idea/ ” Goethe was taken aback and a little
irritated. Controlling himself he said: “How splendid that I have ideas
without knowing it, and can see them before my eyes.” From the
argument Goethe was left with the philosophic concept that ideas must
be clearly independent of space and time, whereas experience is re¬
stricted to space and time. “The simultaneous and successive are there¬
fore intimately bound together in an idea, whereas they are always
separated in experience.”

It was eighteen years after the Congress of Vienna before references
to the metamorphosis of plants began to appear in botanical texts and
other writings, and thirty years before it was fully accepted by botanists.
When the essay became known in Switzerland and France people were
astonished to find that a poet “normally occupied with moral
phenomena associated with feeling and power and imagination, could
have achieved such an important discovery.”

Late in life Goethe added another basic idea to the science of botany.
With his perception carefully attuned to nature he realized— a genera¬
tion before Darwin was to approach the same subject—that vegetation
had a tendency to grow in two distinct ways: vertically and spirally. With

116 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

his poet s intuition Goethe labeled the vertical tendency, with its sus¬
taining principle, male; the spiral tendency, which conceals itself during
the development of the plant but predominates during blossoming and
| fruiting, he labeled female. “When we see,” said Goethe, “that the
vertical system is definitely male and the spiral definitely female, we will
be able to conceive of all vegetation as androgynous from the root up.
In the course of the transformation of growth the two systems are
separated, and take opposite courses to be reunited on a higher level.”

Goethe held a lofty and comprehensive view of the significance of the

l h? 3 / 6 and / emale P rin ciples as spiritual opposites in the cosmos. Lehrs
elaborated on it: “In order that spiritual continuity may be maintained
within the coming and going multitude of nature’s creations, the physi¬
cal stream must suffer discontinuity at certain intervals. In the case of
the plant this discontinuity is achieved by the breaking asunder of the
male and female growth-principles. When they have reunited, the type
begins to abandon either the entire old plant or at least part of it,
according to whether the species is an annual or a perennial one, in order
to concentrate on the tiny seed, setting, as it were, its living seal on it.”

o Goethe the fact that the action of the root of a plant is directed
earthward toward moisture and darkness, whereas the stem or trunk
strives skyward in the opposite direction toward the light and the air,
was a truly magical phenomenon. To explain it Goethe postulated a
force opposite, or polar, to Newton’s gravity, to which he gave the name
levity. Newton,” says Lehrs, “explained to you—or at least was once
supposed to explain, why an apple fell; but he never thought of explain¬
ing the exact correlative but infinitely more difficult question, how the
apple got up there.” The concept led Goethe to a picture of the earth
as being surrounded and penetrated by a field of force in every respect
the opposite of the earth’s gravitational field.

As the gravity field decreases in strength.” says Lehrs, “with increas-
ng distance from the center of the field, that is, in the outward direc-
,On, so does the levity-field decrease in strength with increasing distance
5? ,ts P er 'P he, y. « in the inward direction. ... This is why things

the influence of gravity and ‘rise’ under the influence of
*wty. Lehrs adds that if there were no field working outward toward

The Metamorphosis of Plants J17

the cosmic periphery, the entire material content of the earthly realm
would be reduced by gravitation to a spaceless point, just as under the
sole influence of the peripheral field of levity it would dissipate into the
universe. “Just as in volcanic activity heavy matter is suddenly and
swiftly driven heavenwards under the influence of levity, so in a storm
does light matter stream earthwards under the influence of gravity.”

Goethe, taking his inspiration from the Rosicrucian Aurea Catena of
1781, presumed to be authored by Herwerd von Forchenbrun, saw the
whole universe as being moved by opposite polar forces which manifest
as light and dark, or plus and minus in electricity, or oxidation and
reduction in chemistry.

In his old age Goethe conceived the earth to be an organism animated
by the same rhythm of inspiration and evaporation as a plant or an
animal. He compared the earth and her hydrosphere, in which he
included the humid atmosphere and its clouds, to a great living being
perpetually inhaling and exhaling. He said:

If she inhales, she draws the hydrosphere to her, so that, coming near
her surface, it is condensed to clouds and rain. This state I call water-
affirmative ( Wasser-Bejahung]. Should it continue for an indefinite pe¬
riod, the earth would be drowned. This the earth does not allow, but
exhales again, and sends the watery vapours upwards, where they are
dissipated through the whole space of the higher atmosphere. These
become so rarefied that not only does the sun penetrate them with its
brilliance, but the eternal darkness of infinite space is seen through them
as a fresh blue. This state of the atmosphere I call water-negative
[ WasserVemeinung], For, just as under the contrary influence, not only
does water come profusely from above, but also the moisture of the earth
cannot be dried and dissipated—so, on the contrary, in this state not only
does no moisture come from above, but the damp of the earth itself flies
upwards; so that, if this should continue for an indefinite period, the
earth, even if the sun did not shine, would be in danger of drying up.

The actual phenomenon of light Goethe considered to be inscrutable,
but disagreed with Newton’s concept that light waves were light itself
and that light was composed of various colors. Goethe considered light
waves to be the physical manifestation of eternal light. He saw light and
dark to be polar opposites, with a series of colors formed by their
interaction: darkness was not complete passive absence of light: it was

118 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

something active, something that opposed itself to light and interplayed
with it. He imagined light and dark as being related like the north and
south poles of a magnet. If darkness were absolute void, said Goethe,
there would be no perception looking into the dark. The importance
Goethe attached to his theory of color is clear from his statement late
in life that‘T do not attach importance to my work as a poet, but I do
claim to be alone in my time in apprehending the true nature of color.”

When Goethe died on March 22, 1832, twenty-seven years before
Darwin was to proclaim his principle of organic evolution, he was consid¬
ered Germany s greatest poet, with a universal mind capable of compass¬
ing every domain of human activity and knowledge. But as a scientist
he was considered a layman.

Though a genus of plants, the Goethea, was named for him, as was
a mineral, goethite, it was as a courtesy to a great man, more than to a
scientist. In due course Goethe was credited with having coined the
word morphology and of having formulated the concept of botanical
morphology which persists to this day. He was credited with the discov¬
ery of the volcanic origin of mountains, with establishing the first system
of weather stations, with being interested in connecting the Gulf of
Mexico with the Pacific Ocean, and with wanting to build steamships
and flying machines; but the scope of Goethe's formulation of the
metamorphosis of plants had to await the advent of Darwin to be fully
appreciated, and even then it was largely misunderstood.

As Rudolf Steiner was to write, almost a hundred years later,

It was from observations similar to those of Goethe that Darwin pro¬
ceeded when he asserted his doubt as to the constancy of the external
forms of genera and species. But the conclusions which the two thinkers
reached were entirely unlike. Whereas Darwin considered that the whole
nature of the organism was, in fact, comprised in these characteristics,
and came to the conclusion, therefore, that there is nothing constant in
the life of the plant, Goethe went deeper and drew the inference that,
since those characteristics are not constant, what is constant must be
sought in something else which lies beneath changeable externalities.

The Metamorphosis of Plants 119

CHAPTER 8

Plants Will Grow
to Please You

Goethe’s poetic notion that a spiritual essence lies behind the material
form of plants was put on a firmer basis by a medical doctor and a
professor of physics at the University of Leipzig. Credited with over
forty papers on such subjects as the measurement of electrical currents
and the perceptions of colors, Gustav Theodor Fechner came to his
profound understanding of plants in a totally unexpected way. In 1839
he began to stare at the sun in the hope of discovering the nature of
afterimages, those strange pictures which seem to persist on the retina
of the eye even after the cessation of normal visual stimulus.

A few days later, Fechner was horrified to realize that he was going

1

rblind. Exhausted from overwork, and unable in his new affliction to face
[his friends and colleagues, he retired to a darkened room with a mask
lover his face, to live in solitude praying for recovery.

[ One spring morning three years later, sensing that his sight had been
I restored, he emerged into the light of day. Joyously walking along the
! Mulde River he instantly recognized that flowers and trees along its
[banks were what he called be-souled. “As I stood by the water and

r m

[ watched a flower, it was as though I saw its soul lift itself from the bloom
; and, drifting through the mist, become clearer until the spiritual form
[hung clearly above it. Perhaps it wanted to stand on the roof of its

^budding house in order better to enjoy the sun. Believing itself invisible,

>■

j: it was quite surprised when a little child appeared.”

[' While still in semi-seclusion Fechner began setting down a series of
Lsimilar remarkable impressions. The result was Nanna, or the Soul-Life
[ of Plants , published in Leipzig in 1848, which though scathingly re¬
jected by his fellow academicians, became so popular that it was still
[being printed in Germany three-quarters of a century later.

[ In his introduction, Fechner explained that he happened on the title
| by accident. At first he thought of calling his new book Flora , after the
| Roman goddess of flowers, or Hamadryas, after the wood nymphs which
[ the Hellenes recognized as living only as long as the trees of which they
jj were the spirit. But he rejected the first as too botanical, the second as
t too classically stiff and antiquarian. One day, while reading Teutonic
\ mythology, Fechner learned that Baldur, god of light, had, like Actaeon

■ peeping at Diana, secretly gazed upon the naked form of the flower
I princess Nanna as she bathed in a stream. When her natural loveliness

was enhanced by the energy over which Baldur ruled, his heart, said the
| legend, was pierced, and the marriage of Light and Flowers became a
| foregone conclusion.

i Fechner’s awakening to the soul life of plants turned him from pro-
: fessing physics to professing philosophy, of which branch of knowledge
l he was given a chair at Leipzig the same year that Nanna appeared.
L However, even before his realization that plants had undreamed-of

■ sensitivity, Fechner had concerned himself with cosmic problems in his

[■ Little Book of Life After Death , posthumously published in Dresden in

i

! Plants Will Grow to Please You 121

j

i

1936, and in Comparative Anatomy of the Angels , a work which he
considered so risque that he wrote it under the pseudonym of Dr. Mises

In the Little Book Fechner put forward the idea that human life was
lived in three stages: one of continuous sleep from conception to birth-
one of half wakefulness, which humans called terrestrial life; and one of
fuller alertness, which began only after death. In Comparative Anatomy
he traced the path of evolution from monocellular organisms through
man on to angelic higher beings spherical in form and capable of seeing
universal gravitation as ordinary humans perceive light, of communicat¬
ing not acoustically but through luminous symbols.

Fechner introduced Nanna with the concept that believing whether
plants have a soul or not changes one’s whole insight into nature. If man
admitted to an omnipresent, all-knowing, and almighty god who be¬
stowed animation on all things, then nothing in the world could be
excluded from this munificence, neither plant nor stone nor crystal nor
wave. Why would universal spirit, he asked, sit less firmly in nature than
in human beings, and not be as much in command of nature’s power
as it is of human bodies?

Anticipating Bose’s work, Fechner further reasoned that if plants
have life and soul, they must have some sort of nervous system, hidden
perhaps in their strange spiral fibers. Going beyond the limitation of
"today’s mechanistic physiology, Fechner referred to “spiritual nerves”
in the universe, one expression of which was the interconnection of
celestial bodies, not with “long ropes,” but with a unified web of light,
gravity, and forces as yet unknown. The soul, said Fechner, receives
sensations, in a manner analogous to that of a spider which is alerted
to outside influences by its web. It seemed reasonable to Fechner to
accept the idea that plants have nerves, their purported absence being
due to man’s ignorance rather than to any innate vegetal deficiency.

According to Fechner, the psyche of plants is no more linked to their
nervous system than is the soul of man to a human body. Both are
diffused throughout, yet separated from all the organs which they direct.
“None of my limbs anticipates anything for itself,” wrote Fechner,
“only I, the spirit of my whole, sense everything that happens to me.’

Fechner created a new branch of learning called psychophysics , which

122 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

abolished the artificial separation between mind and body and held the
two entities to be only different sides of one reality, the mind appearing
subjectively, the body objectively, as a circle is either concave or convex
depending on whether the observer stands inside it or outside. The
confusion resulted, said Fechner, because it was difficult to hold both
points of view simultaneously. To Fechner all things express in different
ways the same anima mundi, or cosmic soul, which came into existence
with the universe, is its conscience, and will die when and if the universe
dies. Basic to his animate philosophy was the axiom that all life is one
and simply takes up different shapes in order to divert itself. The highest
good and supreme end of all action is the maximum pleasure not of the

individual but of all, said Fechner, and on this he based all his rules for
morals.

Since spirit to Fechner was a deistic universal, it was useless to refer
to souls as wholly individual, whether vegetal or human. Nonetheless
souls provided the only criteria for forming a conception of other souls
and making themselves known to them by outward physical signs. To
the undoubted irritation of today’s prevalent school of behaviorist, “car-
rot-and-stick” psychology, Fechner also maintained that in its soul alone
was the true freedom of any creature.

Because a plant is rooted, it necessarily has less freedom of movement
than an animal, Fechner declared, though by moving its branches,
leaves, and tendrils as it sees fit it behaves much like an animal which
opens its claws upon capture or runs away when frightened.

More than a century before experiments in the Soviet Union appar¬
ently convinced the Russians that plants can regulate their own needs
with the help of man-designed instrumentation, Fechner asked, “Why
should we believe that a plant is not any less aware of hunger and thirst
than an animal? The animal searches for food with its whole body, the
plant with portions of it, guided not with nose, eyes or ears but with
other senses.” It seemed to Fechner that “plant people,” calmly living
their lives in the spots of their rooting, might well wonder why human
bipeds keep rushing about. “In addition to souls which run and shriek
and devour, might there not be souls which bloom in stillness, exhale
fragrance and satisfy their thirst with dew and their impulses by their

Plants Will Grow to Please You 123

burgeoning? Could not flowers, Fechner asked, communicate with

each other by the very perfumes they exude, becoming aware of each

other s presence by a means more delightful than the verbiage and

breath of humans, which is seldom delicate or fragrant except, by coinci¬
dence, in lovers?

From inside comes the voice,” wrote Fechner, "and from inside
comes the scent. Just as one can tell human beings in the dark from the
tone of their voices, so in the dark, every flower can be recognized by
its scent. Each carries the soul of its progenitor.” Flowers having no
fragrance he likened to animals which live alone in the wilds, and those
with perfume to gregarious beasts. In the end, posited this German sage,
was it not one of the ultimate purposes of human bodies to serve vegetal
life, surrounding it by emitting carbon dioxide for the plants to breathe,
and manuring them with human bodies after death? Did not flowers and
trees finally consume man and, by combining his remains together with
raw earth, water, air, and sunlight, transform and transmute human
bodies into the most glorious forms and colors?

Fechner s animism, for which he was so wrathfully castigated by
his contemporaries, led him to issue, two years after Nanna, a book on
atomic theory, in which, long before the birth of particle physics, he
argued that atoms were centers of pure energy and the lowest elements
in a spiritual hierarchy. The following year he brought out Zendavesta,
its title inspired by the sacred writings of the ancient Zoroastrians, who
claimed that their great religious leader Zarathustra had taught his
people how to breed the food plants that still today form our chief source
of nourishment. The original Zendavesta might be considered the first
textbook on agriculture. Fechner’s work was characterized by the
younger American philosopher William James as a "wonderful book by
a wonderful genius. Its fascinating and complex philosophy contained
such concepts as that of "mental energy ” which appealed strongly to

Sigmund Freud and without which the edifice of psychoanalysis might
never have been built.

Though Fechner heroically attempted to put forward what his con¬
temporaries, and many present-day philosophers, would call "an idealis¬
tic view of reality,” he ceaselessly tried to reconcile it with the methodol-
ogy of modern science, in which he was trained.

124 PIONEERS O

F PLANT MYSTERIES

Perhaps this was why the Leipzig physician and physicist, character¬
ized as one of the most versatile thinkers of the nineteenth century was
so excellent an observer of the details of the vegetable world surrounding
hum In Nanna he described the sex organs of plants-which in humans
St. Paul considered so uncomely—as marvels of beauty, lyricizing on the
manner m which plants lure insects to wriggle into their genitalia to
drink the hidden nectar and thus shake fertilizing pollen from the
anthers of some distant blossom onto the stigma of their petals. Fechner
marveled at how plants could devise the most sophisticated systems to
spread their species, how the puffball waits to be trodden upon in order
to produce a cloud of minute spores which are carried a great distance
by the wind, how the maple casts off propeller seeds that spin away with
a passing breeze, how fruit trees seduce birds, beasts, and man into
distributing their seeds afar, neatly packaged in nourishing manure, how

viviparous water lilies and ferns reproduce tiny but perfect plants on the
surface of their leaves,

Fechner also expatiated on plant roots, the sensitive tips of which

enable plants to maintain a sense of direction, and on the climbing

tendrils of plants which, searching for purchase, repeat perfect circles
in the air.

Though Fechner’s work was not taken seriously in his own time, one
Englishman, whose life ran parallel to Fechner’s, had the daring to
recognize that some mysterious force in plants had the characteristics
of sentience or intelligence. After publishing his earthshaking Origin of
Species in 1859, Charles Robert Darwin devoted the greater part of his
remaining twenty-three years not only to an elaboration on his theory
o evo ution but to a meticulous study of the behavior of plants.

In his 575-page The Power of Movement in Plants, published just
before his death, Darwin developed in a more scientific way than
Fechner the idea that the habit of moving at certain times of day was
the common inheritance of both plants and animals. The most striking
part of this similarity, he wrote, was “the localization of their sensitive¬
ness and the transmission of an influence from the excited part to
another which consequently moves.”

Though this seemed to imply that Fechner might have been correct
m stating that plants, like animals, had nervous systems, Darwin stopped

Plants Will Grow to Please You 125

short of making this assertion because he could find no such system.
Nevertheless, he could not get out of his mind that plants must have
sentient ability. In the very last sentence of his massive volume, referring
to the properties of a plant's radicle—that part of its embryo which
develops into the primary root—he stated boldly: “It is hardly an exag¬
geration to say that the tip of the radicle acts like the brain of one of
the lower animals: the brain being seated within the anterior end of the
body, receiving impressions from the sense organs, and directing the
several movements.”

In an earlier book, The Fertilization of Orchids , published in 1862,
one of the most masterful and complete studies on a single species of
plant life ever to appear, Darwin set forth in highly technical language
the way insects caused the fertilization of those unusual flowers, which
he had learned of by sitting on the grass for hours and patiently watching
the process.

In more than a dozen years of experiments conducted on fifty-seven
species of plants Darwin found that products of cross-pollination resul¬
ted in more numerous, larger, heavier, more vigorous and more fertile
offspring, even in species that are normally self-pollinating, and he put
his finger on the secret of the production of such copious amounts of
pollen. Though the odds were millions to one against it, if the pollen
of an immobile plant could mix with a faraway relative, its offspring were
likely to attain what came to be known as “hybrid vigor.” Of this Darwin
wrote that “the advantages of cross-fertilization do not follow from some
mysterious virtue in the mere union of two distinct individuals, but from
such individuals having been subjected during previous generations to
different conditions, or to their having varied in a manner commonly
called spontaneous, so that in either case their sexual elements have been
in some degree differentiated.”

For all his academic preciseness, the thrust of Darwin's theory of
evolution and of the survival of the fittest indicated that something more
than chance was in play. That this something might accommodate to
the wish of man was the next extraordinary development.

In 1892, ten years after Darwin's death and five years after Fechner's,
a fifty-two-page nurseryman's catalog, New Creations in Fruits and Flow-

126 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

ers, published in Santa Rosa, California, created a sensation in the
United States. Unlike similar booklets, which had thus far included not
more than half a dozen novelties among the hundreds advertised, this
catalog contained not a single plant known to man.

Among its horticultural marvels were a hardwood giant Paradox wal¬
nut, which, growing as fast as a spongy pulpwood, could form a hedge
tall enough to screen a house within a few years; a giant daisy, named
for Mount Shasta, with mammoth snow-white petals; an apple, sweet
on one side and sour on the other; and a cross between a strawberry and
a raspberry which, though it did not fruit, seemed as strange to followers
of the theory of natural selection as would the mating of a chicken with
an owl.

When the catalog finally made its way six thousand miles to the
Netherlands, it caught the eye of an Amsterdam professor, Hugo De
Vries, in the process of rediscovering the modern science of genetics—
originated in the mid-nineteenth century by the Austrian monk Gregor
Johann Mendel, but buried during his lifetime in the shelves of his
monastery library. De Vries, later to be celebrated for carrying forward
Darwin's life work with his own theory of mutation, was flabbergasted
by the catalog and the apparent ability of one man to bring into the
world botanical specimens undreamed of by nature. To satisfy his curi¬
osity, De Vries set off across the world to visit the catalog’s publisher,
who turned out to be a New England transplant to California, Luther
Burbank, whose feats with plants led to the new transitive verb to
hurhank , * and his reputation as the “Wizard of Horticulture” was to
infuriate botanists unable to understand the magic of his methods.

When De Vries came to Santa Rosa and saw growing in the “wi¬
zard s front yard a fourteen-year-old Paradox walnut larger than the
Persian variety four times its age and a monkey-puzzle tree which could
stun passers-by by dropping twenty-pound nuts on their heads, he was
dumbstruck that in the little cottage where Burbank worked there was

* Webster’s New International Dictionary , 2d ed., lists: “Burbank, v.t. To modify and
improve (plants or animals) esp. by selective breeding. Also to cross or graft (a plant).
Hence, figuratively, to improve (anything, as a process or institution) by a selecting of good
features and rejecting of bad, or by adding good features.

Plants Will Grow to Please You 127

J

neither library nor laboratory and that Burbank’s work notes were kept
on tearings from brown-paper bags or the backs of letters and envelopes.

Throughout the evening the bewildered De Vries, who had expected
files of carefully recorded data which might reveal Burbank’s secrets,
questioned the plant breeder, only to be told that his art was basically
“a matter of concentration and the rapid elimination of non-essentials.”
As for his laboratory, Burbank told De Vries: “I keep it in my head.”

The Dutch scientist was no more perplexed than were hundreds of
his American confreres who, lacking any rational explanation for Bur¬
bank's methodology, often branded the wizard a charlatan. Burbank’s
own evaluation of the botanical fraternity did little to appease their
collective ire. In 1901 Burbank told the San Francisco Floral Congress:

The chief work of the botanists of yesterday was the study and classifi¬
cation of dried, shriveled plant mummies whose souls had fled. They
thought their classified species were more fixed and unchangeable than
anything in heaven or earth that we can now imagine. We have learned
that they are as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter or
color on the artists' canvas and can readily be molded into more beautiful
forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.

Unlike the narrower minds which such simple and truthful state¬
ments drove to frenzy, De Vries, accepting Burbank as a natural-bom
genius, wrote of his work that “its value for the doctrine of evolution
compels our highest admiration.”

As his biographers almost inadvertently make clear, Burbank was and
remains an enigma. Born in 1849 in the rural Massachusetts village of
Lunenburg, the lasting impressions from his schooling came from his
reading of Henry David Thoreau and of the other great naturalists
Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Agassiz. But even these were over¬
shadowed when he devoured, shortly after its publication in 1868,
Charles Darwin's massive two-volume The Variation of Animals and
Plants Under Domestication. Burbank was deeply impressed by its
theme that organisms, when removed from their natural conditions,
vary.

While still in Massachusetts, Burbank one day happened upon a seed
ball in his patch of potatoes—a vegetable which almost never sets seed

128 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

\ and is therefore propagated from the buds, or "eyes,” of its tuber.
| Because he knew that potato seeds, if they could be found, would not
I grow tubers true to type, and instead would produce a curious batch of
L mongrels, he excitedly thought that one of them might develop into a
\ potato miracle. One of the twenty-three seeds in the ball gave rise to
[ an offspring that managed to double the average yield. Smooth, plump,

j a n excellent baker, the new potato, unlike its red-skinned progenitor, was
[ creamy-white.

i Burbank received $150 from a Marblehead seedman for his discovery
j and the compliment that it was the best potato the seedman had ever
[ eaten. Christened the "Burbank,” it was later widely planted by growers
jj the San Joaquin River delta town of Stockton, California, who grate-
[ fully presented to Burbank its solid gold miniature replica. Today it
[ dominates the U.S. potato market. Three days after the original sale—

! following the terse advice he later gave to a New England farmer who
i asked him what he should raise on some newly acquired acreage,

■ Enough money to go to California”—Burbank was on a cross-con tinen-

tal train.

r

l Shortly after Burbank’s arrival in Santa Rosa, Darwin’s The Effects of
\ Cross and SeLf Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom came out, and
Burbank was particularly struck by a challenging introductory statement:

As plants are adapted by such diversified and effective means for
cross-fertilization, it might have been inferred from this fact alone that
they derived some great advantage from the process.” To Burbank, this
i sentence seemed both a blueprint and a command. If Darwin had drawn
i plans, he would carry them out.

. Burbank's first chance for fame came in the spring of 1882 when a
variety of plums known as prunes were coming into their own in hun¬
dreds of California orchards as a new money-making fruit, easily dried
and thus easily shipped and slow to spoil. In March a canny banker in
the neighboring town of Petaluma, fearful lest he miss the bonanza,
asked Burbank if he could deliver twenty thousand young prune trees
for a two-hundred-acre planting by December. Everyone else, said the
worried banker, had told him this was impossible. Burbank knew that
if the man had given him two years nothing would have been simpler

Plants Will Grow to Please You 129

I

than to sprout plum trees from seed, bud them with prunes in the late
summer, and after cutting off the original plum tops, watch them de¬
velop into prune seedlings the year following. How, he asked himself,
could he turn the same trick in eight months?

It then struck Burbank that almonds, a member of the genus Prunus,
would sprout much faster than the hard stones of plums. After buying
a sackful of the oval-shaped nuts, Burbank forced them to sprout in
warm water, copying a method he had used with corn in Massachusetts,
which allowed him to beat other farmers to the market by more than
a week. Even so, the little seedlings were not ready for budding until
June, and time was running short. With a cash advance from the banker,
Burbank hired all available nursery help in the region. They worked
around the clock; when the job was finished, Burbank prayed that his
tiny seedlings would grow into trees as tall as the average woman in the
four months remaining before the contract called for delivery. His luck
held; before Christmas he was able to deliver 19,500 trees to the over¬
joyed banker. Other nurserymen were left gasping at the feat, which not
only produced a $6,000 windfall for Burbank but taught him that mass
production was one of the keys to prodding out of nature secrets she was
normally unwilling to give up.

- Thus began Burbank’s pomological revolution, which led to the devel¬
opment of new prunes and plums—including one, the Climax, which
tasted like a pineapple, and another which tasted like a pear—that today
still account for over half of California’s giant crop; the ever-popular
Burbank July Elberta peach, a luscious Burbank Flaming Gold necta¬
rine, a bush-type chestnut, which bore a crop six months after its seed
was put in the ground, a white blackberry the color of an icicle, and two
quinces that were so good that most nurseries still stock no other.

In developing new fruit, Burbank was so adept and fast that he could
race through thousands of cross-pollinations while orthodox plant spe¬
cialists in laboratories were pedantically poring over sheaves of notes
involving only a few dozen. It was no wonder that the schoolmen
increasingly accused him of trickery, mainly of buying his “new crea¬
tions” abroad. For Burbank, convinced that plants, like people, would
behave differently when away from home, would order, from as far away
as Japan and New Zealand, experimental varieties to cross with home-

130 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

grown standbys. Burbank introduced over a thousand new plants, which,
if evenly spaced over his working career, would have amounted to a
never-before-seen specimen every three weeks. Despite the backbiting
cavils from envious and narrow-minded scientists, this miracle making
was heralded by professional experts big enough to recognize genius
when they saw it, even if it passed their understanding.

Liberty Hyde Bailey, the universally recognized dean of American
botany, who had earlier told a world horticultural congress that “man
could not do much to produce variations in plants,” came from Cornell
University to see what Burbank was doing to create such a furor. He left
Santa Rosa stupefied and wrote the same year in an issue of World’s
Work magazine:

Luther Burbank is a breeder of plants by profession, and in this business
he stands almost alone in this country. So many and so striking have been
the new plants that he has given to the world that he has been called the
“Wizard of Horticulture.” This sobriquet has prejudiced a good many
people against his work. Luther Burbank is not a wizard. He is an honest,
straight-forward, careful, inquisitive and persistent man. He believes that
causes produce results. He has no other magic than that of patient
inquiry, abiding enthusiasm, an unprejudiced mind, and a remarkably
acute judgement of the merits and capabilities of plants.

This was a delight to Burbank, who smarted from the ugly rumors
circulated about his work in the halls of academe. He told a packed
lecture hall at Stanford University that “Orthodoxy is ankylosis—no¬
body at home: ring up the undertaker for further information!” Profes¬
sor H. J. Webber, a geneticist in charge of plant breeding at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, maintained that Burbank had single-hand¬
edly saved the world nearly a quarter of a century in plant-breeding time.
David Fairchild, who spent years exploring the world for new plants
which might prove commercially useful in the United States, though
baffled by Burbank’s methods, summed up his impressions of his visit
to Santa Rosa in a letter to a friend: “There are those who say Burbank
is not scientific. It is true only in the sense that he has tried to do so
much, and has been so fascinated by the desire to create that he has not
always noted and labeled the footsteps which he has taken.”

Just watching Burbank at work took the breath away from countless

Plants Will Grow to Please You 131

1

observers. On his experimental farm in nearby Sebastopol, where forty
thousand Japanese plums or a quarter of a million flowering bulbs could
be seen growing at the same time, Burbank would walk down a row of
thousands of plants—whether tiny seedlings just breaking ground or
chest-high flowers nearing maturity—and without breaking his stride
pick out those likely to succeed. One wide-eyed county farm adviser
described this in his own words: “He’d go along a row of gladioli
yanking out the ones he didn’t, want as fast as he could pull them up.
He seemed to have an instinct that told him if a tiny plant would grow
up to bear the kind of fruit or flowers he wanted. I couldn’t see any
difference between them, even if 1 stooped and looked closely, but
Burbank did no more than glance at them.”

Burbank’s catalogs described his results in such a way that readers
could imagine he had thousands of workers and several genies helping
him: “Six new gladioli, the best of a million seedlings.” “The growing
of 10,000 hybrid clematis plants for several years to get a final six good
ones.” “Discarding 18,000 calla lilies in order to get one plant.” “My
Royal Walnut can outgrow ordinary walnuts eight to one and promises
to revolutionize the furniture business and also perhaps the cord-wood
industry.”

* When, on the 18th day of April, 1906, the same earthquake which
all but devastated San Francisco reduced Santa Rosa to a mass of flaming
splinters and rubble, the overwhelmed citizens were further stunned
that not a pane of glass in Burbank’s huge greenhouse not far from the
center of town was even cracked.

Burbank was less amazed than his fellow townsmen, though careful
not to broach the subject directly in public, surmising that his commun¬
ing with the forces of nature and the cosmos and his success with plants
might well have protected his greenhouse.

His indirect allusions to the personalization of his plants are illustrated
by an article he wrote in 1906 for Century Magazine:

The most stubborn living thing in this world, the most difficult to
swerve [he asserted] is a plant once fixed in certain habits. Remember that
this plant has preserved its individuality all through the ages; perhaps it
is one which can be traced backward through eons of time in the very

132 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

rocks themselves. Do you suppose, after all these ages of repetition, the

■ plant does not become possessed of a will, if you so choose to call it, of
unparalleled tenacity?

To Manly P. Hall, founder and president of the Philosophical Re-
. search Society of Los Angeles and a student of comparative religion,
mythology, and esoterica, Burbank revealed that when he wanted his
; plants to develop in some particular and peculiar way not common to
their kind he would get down on his knees and talk to them. Burbank
also mentioned that plants have over twenty sensory perceptions but,
i because they are different from ours, we cannot recognize them. “He
; was not sure, wrote Hall, “that the shrubs and flowers understood his
| words, but he was convinced that by some telepathy, they could com-
| prehend his meaning.”

i Hall later confirmed what Burbank told the famous yogi, Parama-
; hansa Yogananda, about his development of the spineless cactus, a
• years-Iong procedure during which Burbank at first had to pull thousands
; of cactus thorns from his hands with pliers, though in the end the cacti
grew without thorns. “While I was conducting my experiments with

■ cacti,'” said Burbank, “I often talked to the plants to create a vibration
•of love. ‘You have nothing to fear/ I would tell them. ‘You don't need

i

your defensive thorns. I will protect you.’ ” Burbank’s power of love,
reported Hall, greater than any other, was a subtle kind of nourishment
that made everything grow better and bear fruit more abundantly.
[Burbank explained to me that in all his experimentation he took plants
\ into h* s confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held
r their small lives in deepest regard and affection.”

I Helen Keller, deaf and blind, after a visit to Burbank, wrote in Out¬
look for the Blind: “He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a
child. When plants talk to him, he listens. Only a wise child can
I understand the language of flowers and trees.” Her observation was
particularly apt since all his life Burbank loved children. In his essay
[“Training of the Human Plant,” later published as a book, he an-
f ticipated the more humane attitudes of a later day and shocked authori-
[tarian parents by saying, “It is more important for a child to have a good
| nervous system than to try to ‘force’ it along the line of book knowledge

[ Plants Will Grow to Please You 133

at the expense of its spontaneity, its play. A child should learn through
a medium of pleasure, not of pain. Most of the things that are really
useful in later life come to the children through play and through
association with nature.”

Burbank, like other geniuses, realized that his successes came from
having conserved the exuberance of a small boy and his wonder for
everything around him. He told one of his biographers: “I’m almost
seventy-seven, and I can still go over a gate or run a foot race or kick
the chandelier. That’s because my body is no older than my mind—and
my mind is adolescent. It has never grown up and I hope it never will.”

It was this quality which so puzzled the dour scientists who looked
askance at his power of creation and bedeviled audiences who expected
him to be explicit as to how he produced so many horticultural wonders.
Most of them were as disappointed as the members of the American
Pomological Society, gathered to hear Burbank tell “all” during a lecture
entitled “How to Produce New Fruits and Flowers,” who sat agape as
they heard him say:

In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of
nature, whether relating to the life, growth, structure and movements of
a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the psychological movements of the
human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can become one
of nature's interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world.
Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must
be laid aside. Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one
by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which
was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She conveys
her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these
truths as suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole
universe in harmony with us. At last man has found a solid foundation
for science, having discovered that he is part of a universe which is
eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.

Had he known of Fechner, Burbank would have agreed with him
“that it is a dark and cold world we sit in if we will not open the inward
eyes of the spirit to the inward flame of nature.”

134 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

CHAPTER 9

Wizard of Tuskegee

:

L

\

!

r

| That plants were able to reveal their hidden secrets upon request was
\ accepted as normal and natural by a remarkable genius born just before
i the Civil War, the agricultural chemist George Washington Carver,
who overcame the handicap of his slave descent to be heralded in his
; own lifetime as the “Black Leonardo.”

( During a stunningly creative career, with methods as incomprehensi-
| ble to his fellow scientists as were those of his professional forebears the
alchemists, Carver turned the lowly peanut, considered useful only as
v hog food, and the unknown sweet potato into hundreds of separate
f products, ranging from cosmetics and axle grease to printer’s ink and
I coffee.

From the time he was able to get about by himself in the countryside
young Carver began to display an uncanny knowledge of all growing
things. Local farmers in Diamond Grove, a tiny community in the
foothills of the Ozarks in southwestern Missouri, remembered the weak-
looking boy roving for hours through their holdings, examining plants
and bringing back certain varieties with which he could miraculously
heal sick animals. On his own, the child planted a private garden in a
remote and unused bit of bottomland. With the remnants of coldframes
and other stray material he built a secret greenhouse in the woods. Asked
what he was forever doing all by himself so far from the farmyard, Carver
replied firmly if enigmatically, “I go to my garden hospital and take care
of hundreds of sick plants.”

Farmers’ wives from all over the countryside began bringing him their
ailing house plants, begging him to make them bloom. Gently caring for
them in his own way, Carver often sang to them in the same squeaky
voice which characterized him in manhood, put them in tin cans with
special soil of his own concoction, tenderly covered them at night, and
took them out to “play in the sun” during the day. When he returned
the plants to their owners, and repeatedly was asked how he could work
his miracles, Carver only said softly: “All Bowers talk to me and so do
hundreds of little living things in the woods. I learn what I know by
watching and loving everything.”

Enrolling in Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, Carver supported
himself through his skill as a laundryman by doing shirts for students,
then transferred to the Iowa State College of Agriculture. There among
his most lasting impressions was the statement of his best-loved teacher,
Henry Cantwell Wallace, editor of the popular Wallace’s Farmer, that
“nations endure only as long as their topsoil.” Carrying a heavy load of
course work and employed by churches as an entirely self-taught organ¬
ist, Carver found time to take Wallace’s six-year-old grandson on long
walks into the woods to talk with plants and fairies, little suspecting that
the hand he was holding would be that of a Secretary of Agriculture,
and later, two years before Carver’s own death, Vice President of the
United States.

By 1896, Carver had his master’s degree and was invited to join the

136 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

faculty. However, when the founder and president of the Normal and
Industrial Institute, Booker T. Washington, who had heard of Carver’s
brilliance, asked him to come to Tuskegee, Alabama, and run the in¬
stitute’s agricultural department, Carver decided, like Sir Jagadis
Chandra Bose, that he could not let the prospect of a comfortable and
well-paying post on the Iowa State faculty dissuade him from serving his
own people. So he accepted.

Carver had not been back in the South more than a few weeks when
he discerned that the main problem facing the flat land spreading out
in hundreds of square miles around him was its slow poisoning through
monotonous planting year in year out of a single crop, cotton, which for
generations had been sucking fertility out of the soil. To counteract the
despoliation by thousands of sharecroppers, he decided to set up an
experimental station. There he had a private laboratory, christened
“God’s Little Workshop,” in which he would sit for hours communing
with plants and into which he never allowed a single book to penetrate.

For his students at Tuskegee he made his lectures as simple and yet
as thoroughgoing as possible. When the chancellor of the University of
Georgia, W. B. Hill, came to Tuskegee to see for himself if it was true
that a Negro professor was as brilliant as rumor had reported, he declared
that Carver’s presentation on the problem of Southern agriculture was
“the best lecture that it has ever been my privilege to attend.” Carver’s
students were greatly impressed that each morning he would rise at four
o’clock to walk in the woods before the start of the working day and
bring back countless plants with which to illustrate his lectures. Explain¬
ing this habit to friends, Carver said, “Nature is the greatest teacher and
I learn from her best when others are asleep. In the still dark hours
before sunrise God tells me of the plans I am to fulfill.”

For more than a decade Carver worked daily on experimental plots
of soil trying to discover exactly how to change Alabama’s enthrallment
by “ol’ debbil cotton.” On one nineteen-acre plot he put no commercial
fertilizer, benefiting it instead with nothing but old dead leaves from the
forest, rich muck from the swamps, and barnyard manure. The plot
furnished such bountiful harvests of rotated crops that Carver came to
the conclusion that “in Alabama the very fertilizers which existed in

Wizard of Tuskegee 137

almost unlimited supply were allowed to go to waste in favor of commer¬
cially sold products.”

As a horticulturalist, Carver had noticed that the peanut was incredi¬
bly self-sufficient and could grow well in poor soil. As a chemist, he
discovered that it equaled sirloin steaks in protein and potatoes in car¬
bohydrates. Late one evening while pondering the problem in his work¬
shop Carver stared at a peanut plant and asked, “Why did the Lord
make you?” In a flash, he received the briefest of answers: “You have
three things to go by: compatibility, temperature, and pressure.”

With this slim advice Carver locked himself in his laboratory. There,
throughout a sleepless week, he began breaking down the peanut into
its chemical components and exposing them by trial and error to differ¬
ent conditions of temperature and pressure. To his satisfaction he found
that one-third of the little nut was made up of seven different varieties
of oil. Working round the clock, he analyzed and synthesized, took apart
and recombined, broke down and built up the chemically differentiable
parts of the peanut until at last he had two dozen bottles, each contain¬
ing a brand-new product.

Leaving his laboratory, he convoked a meeting of farmers and agricul¬
tural specialists and showed them what he had been able to do in seven
days and seven nights. He begged his audience to plow under the
soil-destroying cotton and plant peanuts in its stead, assuring them that
it would produce a cash crop far more valuable than its sole existing use
as food for pigs might indicate.

The audience was doubtful, the more so when Carver, asked to
explain his methods, replied that he never groped for them but that they
came to him in flashes of inspiration while walking in the woods. To allay
their doubts he began to issue bulletins, one of which stated incredibly
that rich, nutritious, and highly palatable butter could be made from the
peanut, and that whereas it took one hundred pounds of dairy milk to
make ten pounds of butter, a hundred pounds of peanuts could produce
thirty-five pounds of peanut butter. Other bulletins showed how a cor¬
nucopia of products could also be extracted from the sweet potato, a
tropical vine of which most Americans had never heard, that throve in
the South's cotton-debased soil. When World War I broke out, and the

138 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

shortage of dyestuffs presented itself as a serious national problem,
Carver rambled at daybreak through the mist and dew, inquiring of his
plant friends which of them could alleviate the deficit. From the leaves,
roots, stems, and fruits of twenty-eight volunteers he coaxed 536 sepa¬
rate dyes, which could be used to color wool, cotton, linen, silk, and even
leather, producing 49 of them from the scuppernong grape alone.

At last his labors attracted national attention. When it was bruited
that at Tuskegee Institute they were saving two hundred pounds of
wheat per day by mixing two parts of ordinary flour with a new flour
derived from sweet potatoes, a flock of dieticians and food writers inter¬
ested in cooperating with the wartime drive to economize on wheat
came to investigate. They were served delicious breads made from the
mixed flours, along with a sumptuous lunch of five courses each made
from peanuts or sweet potatoes, or, like Carver’s “mock chicken,” from
the two combined. The only other vegetables on the table were sheep
sorrel, pepper grass, wild chicory, and dandelions, served as a salad to
illustrate Carver s assertion that plants growing in nature were far better
than those from which the natural vitality had been removed in cultiva¬
tion. The food experts, who realized that Carver’s contributions might
go a long way to helping the war effort, rushed to telephone their papers,
and Carver, who had become known to scientists the year before when
he was elected a fellow of Great Britain’s famous Royal Society, now
appeared in the headlines.

Invited to Washington, Carver dazzled government officials with
dozens of products, including a starch valuable to the textile industry
which later became a component in the glue of billions of U.S. postage
stamps.

Next it came to Carver that peanut oil could help the atrophied
muscles of polio victims. Results were so astonishing that he had to set
aside one day each month to treat patients who came to his laboratory
on stretchers, crutches, or canes. This feat remained as unheralded in
medicine as the application of castor-oil packs, recommended about the
same time by the “sleeping prophet,” Edgar Cayce, with which doctors
of an intrepidly investigative frame of mind are only today beginning to
achieve startling, and wholly inexplicable cures.

Wizard of Tuskegee 139

By 1930, the peanut’s one-time worthlessness had been converted,
through Carver’s clairvoyance, into a quarter of a billion dollars for
Southern farmers, and had created a huge industry. Peanut oil alone was
valued at $60 million a year and peanut butter was establishing itself as
one of the favorite foods of even the poorest American child. Not
satisfied with his achievements, Carver went on to make paper from a
local Southern pine tree which ultimately helped to spur lumberers to
cover millions of Southern acres with productive forests where only
scrub woods had existed.

In the midst of the depression, Carver was again invited to Washing¬
ton to testify before the powerful Ways and Means Committee of the
U.S. Senate, which was considering the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill de¬
signed to protect struggling American manufacturers. Dressed in his
usual, seemingly eternally durable, two-dollar black suit, with an ever¬
present flower in its buttonhole and a home-made necktie, Carver, upon
his arrival at Union Station, was rebuffed by a waiting porter who, when
Carver asked him to help him with his bags and direct him to Congress,
replied: ‘'Sorry, Pop, I ain’t got time for you now. I’m expecting an
important colored scientist coming from Alabama.’’ Patiently Carver
hefted his own bags to a taxi which took him to Capitol Hill.

* Though the committee had accorded him no more than ten minutes
to testify, when he began his presentations and took from his bag face
powders, petroleum substitutes, shampoos, creosote, vinegar, wood-
stains, and other samples of the countless creations concocted in his
laboratories, the Vice President of the United States, testy “Cactus
Jack” Garner from Texas, overruled protocol and told Carver he could
have as much time as he liked because his demonstration was the best
that he had ever seen presented to a Senate committee.

In half a lifetime of research Carver, though he created fortunes for
thousands, rarely took out a patent on any of his ideas. When practical-
minded industrialists and politicians reminded him of the money he
might have made had he only afforded himself this protection, he
replied simply: “God did not charge me or you for making peanuts. Why
should 1 profit from their products?” Like Bose, Carver believed that the
fruit of his mind, however valuable, should be granted free of charge to
mankind.

140 pioneers of plant mysteries

Thomas A. Edison told his associates that “Carver is worth a fortune”
and backed up his statement by offering to employ the black chemist
at an astronomically high salary. Carver turned down the offer. Henry
Ford, who thought Carver “the greatest scientist living,” tried to get
him to come to his River Rouge establishment, with an equal lack of

success.

Because of the strangely unaccountable source from which his magic
with plant products sprang, his methods continued to be as wholly
inscrutable as Burbank’s to scientists and to the general public. Visitors
finding Carver puttering at his workbench amid a confusing clutter of
molds, soils, plants, and insects were baffled by the utter and, to many
of them, meaningless simplicity of his replies to their persistent pleas for

him to reveal his secrets.

To one puzzled interlocutor he said: “The secrets are in the plants.

To elicit them you have to love them enough.”

“But why do so few people have your power?” the man persisted.

“Who besides you can do these things?”

“Everyone can,” said Carver, “if only they believe it.” Tapping a
large Bible on a table, he added, “The secrets are all here. In God's
promises. These promises are real, as real as, and more infinitely solid
and substantial than, this table which the materialist so thoroughly

believes in.”

In a celebrated public lecture, Carver related how he had been able
to call forth from the low mountains of Alabama hundreds of natural
colors from clays and other earths, including a rare pigment of deep blue
which amazed Egyptologists, who saw rediscovered in it the blue color
found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, as bright and fresh after so many
centuries as it was when it had been first applied,

When Carver was eighty or thereabouts—his exact date of birth
never having been established since no records were kept for slave
children—he addressed a meeting of chemists in New York as World
War II was erupting in Europe.

“The ideal chemist of the future,” said Carver, “will not be satisfied
with humdrum day-to-day analysis, but is one who dares to think and
work with an independence not permissible heretofore, unfolding before
our eyes a veritable mystic maze of new and useful products from

Wizard of Tuskegee HI

material almost or quite beneath our feet and now considered of little
or no value.”

Not long before Carver's death a visitor to his laboratory saw him
reach out his long sensitive fingers to a little flower on his workbench.
“When I touch that flower/' he said rapturously, “I am touching infin¬
ity. It existed long before there were human beings on this earth and
will continue to exist for millions of years to come. Through the flower,
I talk to the Infinite, which is only a silent force. This'is not a physical
contact. It is not in the earthquake, wind or fire. It is in the invisible
world. It is that still small voice that calls up the fairies."

He suddenly stopped and after a moment of reflection smiled at his
visitor. "Many people know this instinctively,” he said, "and none better
than Tennyson when he wrote:

"Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.”

142 PIONEERS OF PLANT MYSTERIES

PART III

TUNED TO THE
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

CHAPTER 10

The Harmonic Life of Plants

The strangest experiment Charles Darwin ever performed on a plant was
to sit before his Mimosa pudica, or touch-me-not, and play to if his
bassoon in close enough proximity to see if he could stimulate its pinnae,
or feathery leaflets, into movement. The experiment failed but was
exotic enough to stimulate the renowned German plant physiologist
Wilhelm PfefFer, author of the classic Handbuch der Pflanzenphysiolo -
gie, into attempting, also unsuccessfully, to provoke stamens of Cynara-
rea, a small genus of erect herbs, into response by means of sound.

In 1950 when Professor Julian Huxley, the biologist grandson of
Thomas Henry Huxley and brother of novelist Aldous, was visiting Dr.

T. C. Singh, head of the department of botany at Annamalai University
south of the Tamil-speaking city of Madras, he found his host studying
through a microscope the live streaming of protoplasm in the cells of
Hydrilla verticillata, an aquatic plant of Asian origin with long transpar¬
ent leaves. Aware of both Darwin’s and Pfeffer’s experiments, Huxley
was struck by the idea that the magnification might be sufficient for his
host to see if the streaming process could be affected by sound.

Because the streaming of protoplasm in vegetation begins to speed
up after sunrise, Singh placed an electrically operated tuning fork six feet
from a Hydrilla , and microscopically observed that the fork’s note,
broadcast for half an hour just before 6 a.m., caused the protoplasm to
stream at a speed normally attained only much later in the day.

Singh next asked his young assistant, Stella Ponniah, an accomplished
dancer and violinist, if she would play notes on her instrument while
standing near a Hydrilla. When the girl stroked her strings at a certain
pitch, the protoplasm's streaming was again accelerated.

Because the raga, a traditional form of South Indian devotional song,
has a tonal system which can produce a deep religious feeling and
specific emotions in a listener, Singh decided to try its tones on the

Hydrilla.

■ Lord Krishna, the eighth and principal avatar and incarnation of the
Hindu deity Vishnu, was reputed to have promoted with music enthrall¬
ing growth and bewitching verdure in Vrindavan, a city on the banks
of the Jamuna River in north-central India long famous for its saint-
musicians. Much later a courtier of the famous Moghul emperor Akbar
is reported to have been able to perform such miracles with his songs
as to bring on rain, light oil lamps, vernalize plants and induce them to
blossom simply by intoning ragas at them. This appealing idea is
confirmed in Tamil literature, which refers to the eyes, or buds, of sugar
cane growing vigorously in response to the mellifluous buzzing of speck¬
led beetles and to the profuse oozing of sugary nectar from the golden
flowers of Cassia fistula when serenaded with heart-melting melodies.

Knowing this ancient lore, Singh asked his assistant to play the South
Indian tune “Maya-malava-gauk raga ” to mimosas. After a fortnight,
to Singh s intense excitement, he discovered that the number of stomata

146 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

per unit area in the experimental plants was 66 percent higher, the
epidermal walls were thicker, the palisade cells were longer and broader
than in control plants, sometimes by as much as 50 percent.

Encouraged to further experimentation, Singh requested Gouri
Kumari, a lecturer at Annamalai's Music College, to play a raga known
as the “Kara-hara-priya” to some balsam plants. Kumari, a virtuoso,
played for twenty-five minutes each day, on a fretted lutelike instrument
usually fitted with seven strings, the veena traditionally associated with
Saraswati, goddess of wisdom. During the fifth week, the experimental
balsams began to shoot ahead of their unserenaded neighbors and, at the
end of December, had produced an average of 72 percent more leaves
than the control plants, and had grown 20 percent higher.

Singh then experimented on a vast number of species, such as com¬
mon asters, petunias, cosmos, and white spider lilies, along with such
economic plants as onions, sesame, radishes, sweet potatoes, and tapioca.

Each of these species Singh entertained for several weeks just before
sunrise with more than half a dozen separate ragas, one per experiment,
played on the flute, violin, harmonium, and veena; the music lasted a
half hour daily, scaled at a high pitch, with frequencies between one
hundred and six hundred cycles per second. From all this experimenta¬
tion Singh was able to state, in the magazine of the Bihar Agricultural
College at Sabour, that he had “proven beyond any shadow of doubt
that harmonic sound waves affect the growth, flowering, fruiting, and
seed-yields of plants.”

As a result of his success, Singh began wondering whether sound,
properly prescribed, could spur field crops to greater yields. From 1960
to 1963 he piped the “ Charukesi raga ” on a gramophone via a loud¬
speaker to six varieties of early, medium, and late paddy rice growing in
the fields of seven villages located in the state of Madras and in Pondi¬
cherry on the Bay of Bengal, and got harvests ranging consistently from
25 to 60 percent higher than the regional average. He also was able
musically to provoke peanuts and chewing tobacco into producing nearly
50 percent more than normal. Singh further reported that merely by
dancing the ‘Bharata-Natyam, ” India's most ancient dance style, with¬
out musical accompaniment and executed by girls without trinkets on

77ic Harmonic Life of Plants 147

their ankles, the growth of Michaelmas daisies, marigolds, and petunias
was very much accelerated, causing them to flower as much as a fort¬
night earlier than controls, presumably because of the rhythm of the
footwork transmitted through the earth.

Replying to a question which he thought would “naturally bristle up”
in the minds of his readers, as to exactly what caused the effect on plants,
Singh explained that in his laboratories he could visually demonstrate
that the fundamental metabolic processes of plants in relation to transpi¬
ration and carbon assimilation under the excitation of musical sound or
rhythmic beat were very much accelerated and increased over 200 per¬
cent compared to controls, “The stimulated plants/’ wrote Singh, “are
energized to synthesize greater quantities of food during a given period
of time, which naturally leads to greater yields.” Singh also reported that
his method of musical stimulation has even increased the chromosome
count of certain species of water plants and the nicotine content of
tobacco leaves.

Though the Indians of the subcontinent, both ancient and modern,
appear to have been the first to produce a significant effect on plants
with music or sound, they are by no means the only ones. In the
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, suburb of Wauwatosa, a florist, Arthur Locker,
began piping music into his greenhouses in the late 1950s. The differ¬
ence he observed in flower production before and after the broadcasts
was sufficiently marked to convince Locker that music powerfully con¬
tributed to horticulture. “My plants grew straighter, germinated
quicker, bloomed more abundantly,” he said. “The colors of the flowers
were more striking to the eye, and the blooms lasted longer than usual.

At about the same time a Canadian engineer and gentleman farmer,
Eugene Canby, of Wainfleet, Ontario, broadcast the violin sonatas of
Johann Sebastian Bach to a test plot of wheat and produced a crop not
only 66 percent greater than average but with larger and heavier seeds.
Since the wheat growing in those areas of the plot where the soil was
inferior did just as well as those growing in the richest earth, it seemed
to Canby that Bach's musical genius was as good as or better than
nutrients.

In 1960 in the agricultural community of Normal, Illinois, a botanist

148 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

and agricultural researcher, George E. Smith, learned of Singh’s experi¬
ments while chatting with the farm editor of his local newspaper. The
following spring, Smith, somewhat skeptically, planted corn and soy¬
beans in flats and divided them between two identical greenhouses, both
‘ kept precisely at the same level of temperature and humidity. In one of
the greenhouses he installed a small record player, its speaker directed
toward the experimental plants, and played George Gershwin's “Rhap¬
sody in Blue” twenty-four hours a day. According to Smith’s report to
his employer, Mangelsdorf and Bros., Inc., wholesale field seed suppliers
| in St. Louis, Missouri, the Gershwin-inspired seedlings sprouted earlier
than those given the silent treatment, and their stems were thicker,
tougher, and greener.

Smith, still skeptical, was not satisfied with his subjective observa¬
tions. Removing ten corn and ten soybean plants from each of the
greenhouses, he carefully cut them at ground level and immediately
weighed them on apothecary scales. To his surprise the ten corn plants
which had been enjoying Gershwin's music weighed 40 grams and those
deprived of it only 28 grams; the corresponding soybean plants’ weights
were 31 and 25 grams respectively.

The following year Smith continuously broadcast music to a small plot
of Embro 44XE hybrid corn from the day of its planting to harvest time.
The plot produced 137 bushels to the acre as against only 117 bushels
for an untreated plot of similar corn growing under the same conditions.

■ Smith noted that the musically entertained corn also grew more rapidly
and uniformly and silked earlier. The larger yield per acre was due not
to an increase per plant but to a greater survival of plants in the plot.
To make sure that his tests were not due to chance. Smith laid out four
corn plots in 1962 planted not only with the same Embro 44XE but also
with another highly prolific hybrid, Embro Departure. The first plot was
i treated to the previous year's music, the second left silent, and the third
and fourth offered only ear-splitting continuous notes, one with a high
: pitch of 1,800 cycles a second, the other with a low pitch of 450. At
harvest time the Departure plants stimulated with music produced 186
* bushels per acre as against only 171 for the silent plot. But those exposed

j to the high note outdid themselves to achieve nearly 198 bushels; those

The Harmonic Life of Plants 149

subjected to the low note topped 200. Gains for the Embro 44XE were
less pronounced, though Smith had no idea why.

Pressed by his neighbors from several counties around to explain his
results, Smith speculated that sound energy might increase molecular
activity in the corn, and added that thermometers placed in the plots
indicated that soil temperature was inexplicably two degrees higher
directly in front of the loudspeaker. Smith was perplexed that the edges
of the leaves of those com plants growing in the slightly heated earth
appeared a little burned, but thought this might be due to excessive
exposure to musical vibrations. There were many unresolved mysteries,
said Smith, one of whose Kansas friends had told him that high-fre¬
quency waves had been used successfully to control insects in stored
wheat and that the same wheat planted later germinated faster than
untreated grain.

The frequencies on the so-called sonic spectrum, unlike those on the
so-called electromagnetic spectrum, relate to vibrations in matter, the
medium in which they travel, and result from the rate of its compression
and expansion. Thus a sound wave can pass through air, water, and other
fluids, an iron bar, a table top, a human being, or a plant. Because human
ears can pick up only those frequencies from 16 to about 20,000 cycles
per second, they are known as “audio,” or “sonic,” frequencies. Below
them are inaudible subsonic frequencies, some of which result from
pressure applied slowly, such as that produced with a hydraulic jack,
which become so slow they are measured not in cycles per second but
in seconds per cycle. Above them are ultrasonic frequencies also inaudi¬
ble to the human ear but affecting man’s being in a variety of ways which
are not fully known. Extremely high frequencies on this spectrum,
ranging from hundreds to thousands of millions of cycles per second, can
be perceived as heat on the skin and are therefore termed “thermal,”
though because they too cannot be audially detected could just as well
be considered ultrasonic.

After his experimentation was given publicity all over North America,
Smith received a letter from Peter Belton of the research branch of
Canada s Department of Agriculture, who informed him that he had
broadcast ultrasonic waves to control the European corn-borer moth,

150 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

whose larvae extensively damage growing corn. “At first we tested the
hearing ability of this moth,” wrote Belton. “It was obvious that moths
could hear sounds at about 50,000 cycles. These high-pitched sounds are
much like those made by bats, the moth’s natural enemy. We planted
two plots of corn, each ten feet by twenty, and divided them with sheets
of plastic eight feet tall, capable of stopping this sound frequency. Then
we broadcast the bat-like sound across two of the half-plots from dusk
till dawn throughout the period the moths lay their eggs.” Belton in¬
formed Smith that nearly 50 percent of his ripe corn ears were damaged
by larvae in the silent plots but only 5 percent suffered injury in the plots
where the moths had supposedly suspected bats might be lurking. A
careful count also revealed 60 percent fewer larvae in the sound plots,
and the corn was three inches taller.

In the mid-1960s the varied efforts of Singh and Smith aroused the
curiosity of two researchers at Canada’s University of Ottawa, Mary
Measures and Pearl Weinberger. Like L. George Lawrence, they were
conversant with discoveries by Russians, Canadians, and Americans that
ultrasonic frequencies markedly affect the germination and growth of
barley, sunflower, spruce. Jack pine, Siberian pea tree, and other seeds
and seedlings. The experiments indicated, albeit inexplicably, that en¬
zyme activity and respiration rates in plants and their seeds increased
when they were stimulated by ultrasonic frequencies. However, the very
frequencies which stimulated some plant species inhibited others. Mea¬
sures and Weinberger wondered whether specific audible frequencies in
the sonic range would be as effective as music in enhancing the growth
of wheat.

In a series of experiments lasting more than four years, the two
biologists exposed the grains and seedlings of spring Marquis and winter
Rideau wheat to high-frequency vibrations. They found that, depending
on how long the wheat seeds had been vernalized, the plants responded
best to a frequency of 5,000 cycles a second.

Baffled by their results, the two researchers could not explain why
audible sound had resulted in accelerated growth so striking that it
seemed to promise to double wheat harvests. The effect could not have
been produced by breaking chemical bonds in the seeds, they wrote in

E

The Harmonic Life of Plants 151

the Canadian Journal of Botany , since, to do this, one billion times as
much energy as was added by the sound frequencies would be required.
Instead, they suggested that sound waves might produce a resonant
effect in the plant cells, enabling the energy to accumulate and affect
the plant’s metabolism. In the July, 1968, issue of Prevention magazine
J, I. Rodale reported that Weinberger “is coming to believe that basic
farm equipment of the future will include an oscillator for production
of sound waves and a speaker.”

Asked to confirm whether her experiments might result in application
of sound to wheat seed planted in extended acreage, Dr. Weinberger
stated in 1973 that large-scale tests were going forward in Canada, the
United States, and Europe to determine the practicability of their idea.

Weinberger’s observations are echoed by four scientists at the Univer¬
sity of North Carolina at Greensboro, who have discovered that experi¬
mental “pink” noise, which, at 20 to 20,000 cycles per second and 100
decibels, sounds to the ear about the same as the noise received 100 feet
away from a 727 jet plane about to take off, caused turnips to sprout
much faster than those left silently in the ground. Professor Gaylord T.
Hageseth, a physicist and leader of the research team, says that his
findings have stirred up interest at the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
.which is studying the team’s proposals to awaken seeds planted in hot
regions such as California’s San Joaquin Valley, where temperatures
ranging above 100 degrees Fahrenheit induce dormancy in lettuce seeds.
If awakened by sound irradiation, lettuce might produce two crops per
season instead of one, say Hageseth and his colleagues, who also suggest
that sound waves could be used to make weeds germinate before a field
is planted. The weeds could then be plowed under to allow a crop to
grow in a weed-free field.

Since broadcasting airport-level noise all over the countryside is hardly
appealing, the North Carolina team has been working, like Measures
and Weinberger, to find particular wavelengths or combinations to
produce the desired effects at lower decibel levels. By the beginning of
1973 they had discovered that the germination rate in turnips seemed
to speed up when the turnips were exposed to a frequency of 4,000 cycles
per second.

152 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

An interesting and eventually very controversial series of experiments
on the effects of music on plants began in 1968 when Dorothy Retallack,
a professional organist and mezzo soprano, who gave concerts at Den¬
ver's Beacon Supper Club from 1947 to 1952, felt herself at loose ends
when her eight children went off to college. Not to be the sole member
of the family without a degree, Mrs. Retallack surprised her hard¬
working physician husband with the announcement of her own enroll¬
ment for a degree in music at Temple Buell College. Required to come
up with a laboratory experiment in biology, Mrs. Retallack vaguely
recalled reading an article about George Smith’s playing disc jockey to

t his cornfields.

Following Smith’s lead, Mrs. Retallack teamed with a fellow student,
whose family provided an empty room at home and furnished two
groups of plants, which included philodendron, corn, radishes, gerani¬
ums, and African violets. The neophyte experimenters suspended Gro-
Lux lights over one group and played the taped musical notes B and D
struck on the piano every second, alternating five minutes of those
wearisomely repetitive sounds with five minutes of silence. The tape
played continuously twelve hours a day. During the first week, the
African violets, drooping at the start of the experiment, revived and
began to flower. For ten days all the plants in the sound group seemed
to thrive; but at the end of two weeks the geranium leaves began to
yellow. By the end of the third week all the plants, some of which had
been actually leaning away from the source of the sound as if blown by
a strong wind, had died, with the unaccountable exception of the Afri¬
can violets, which somehow remained outwardly unaffected. The con¬
trol group, allowed to grow in peace, flourished.

When she reported these results to her biology professor, Francis F.
Broman, and asked if she could do a more elaborately controlled experi¬
ment for credit in his course, he reluctantly consented. “The idea made
me groan a little,” said Broman afterward, “but it was novel and I
; decided to okay it, even though most of the other students laughed out

loud.” Broman made available to Dorothy Retallack three new Biotronic
Mark III Environmental Chambers fifty-six feet long, twenty-six feet
high, and eighteen feet deep, recently purchased by his department,

The Harmonic Life of Plants 153

similar in shape but much larger than home fish aquariums, which
allowed for precise control of light, temperature, and humidity.

Allotting one chamber for a control group, Mrs. Retallack used the
same plants, with the exception of the violets, as in the first experiment,
setting them in identical soil and affording them equal amounts of water
on schedule. Trying to pinpoint the musical note most conducive to
survival* each day she tried an F note, played unremittingly for eight
hours in one chamber and three hours intermittently in another. In the
first chamber her plants were stone dead within two weeks. In the
second ‘chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left in
silence.

Mrs. Retallack and Professor Broman were nonplused by these results;
for they had no idea what could be causing the disparate reactions, and
could not help wondering whether the plants had succumbed to fatigue
or boredom or had simply been “driven out of their minds.” The clear-
cut experiments aroused ? spate of controversy in the biology depart¬
ment, with both students and professors either dismissing the whole
effort as spurious, or intrigued by the inexplicable outcome. Two stu¬
dents, following Mrs. Retallack’s lead, ran an eight-week experiment on
summer squashes, broadcasting music from two Denver radio stations
into their chambers, one specializing in heavily accented jock, the other
in classical music.

The cucurbits were hardly indifferent to the two musical forms: those
exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and other eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century European scores grew toward the transistor
radio, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other
squashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb
the slippery walls of their glass cage.

Impressed with her friends’ success, Mrs. Retallack ran a series of
similar trials early in 1969 with corn, squash, petunias, zinnias, and
marigolds; she noticed the same effect. The rock music caused some of
the plants first to grow either abnormally tall and put out excessively
small leaves, or remain stunted. Within a fortnight all the marigolds had
died, but only six feet away identical marigolds, enjoying the classical
strains, were flowering. More interestingly, Mrs. Retallack found that
even during the first week the rock-stimulated plants were using much

154 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

more water than the classically entertained vegetation, but apparently
enjoying it less, since examination of the roots on the eighteenth day
revealed that soil growth was sparse in the first group, averaging only
about an inch, whereas in the second it was thick, tangled, and about
four times as long.

At this point, various critics sourly suggested that the experiments
were invalid because such variables as sixty-cycle hum, the “white
sound” heard from a radio tuned to a frequency not occupied by a radio
transmitter, or the announcers’ voices emitted by the radio sets had not
been taken into account. To satisfy these cavils, Mrs. Retallack taped
rock music from records. She selected the extremely percussive rock
renditions of Led Zeppelin, Vanilla Fudge, and Jimi Hendrix. When
plants leaned away from this cacophony, Mrs. Retallack rotated all the
pots 180 degrees, only to see the plants lean in the opposite direction.
This convinced the majority of critics that the plants were definitely
reacting to the sounds of rock music.

Trying to determine what it was about rock that so jarred her plants,
Mrs. Retallack guessed that it might be the percussive component in the
music and started yet another experiment in the fall. Selecting the
familiar Spanish tune “La Paloma,” she played one version of it per¬
formed on steel drums to one chamber of plants and another version
played on strings to a second. The percussion caused a lean ten degrees
away from the vertical in Mrs. Retallack’s plants, but nothing compared
to the rock. The plants listening to the fiddles leaned fifteen degrees
toward the source of the music. An eighteen-day repeat of the same
experiment using twenty-five plants per chamber including squash from
seed and flowering and leaf-type plants from greenhouses produced
largely similar results.

Now Mrs. Retallack wondered how the effects of what she called
“intellectual mathematically sophisticated music of both East and
West” would appeal to plants. As program director for the American
Guild of Organists, she chose choral preludes from Johann Sebastian
Bach’s Orgelbiichlein and the classical strains of the sitar, a less-com¬
plicated Hindustani version of the south Indian veena, played by Ravi
Shankar, the Bengali Brahmin.

The plants gave positive evidence of liking Bach, since they leaned

Harmonic Life of Plants 1SS

an unprecedented thirty-five degrees toward the preludes. But even this
affirmation was far exceeded by their reaction to Shankar: in their
straining to reach the source of the classical Indian music they bent
more than halfway to the horizontal, at angles in excess of sixty degrees,
the nearest one almost embracing the speaker.

In order not to be swayed by her own special taste for the classical
music of both hemispheres Mrs. Retallack, at the behest of hundreds
of young people, followed Bach and Shankar with trials of folk and
country-western” music. Her plants seemed to produce no more reac¬
tion than those in the silent chamber. Perplexed, Mrs. Retallack could
only ask: “Were the plants in complete harmony with this kind of earthy
music or didn't they care one way or the other?”

Jazz caused her a real surprise. When her plants heard recordings as
varied as Duke Ellington s “Soul Call” and two discs by Louis Arm¬
strong, 5 5 percent of the plants leaned fifteen to twenty degrees toward
the speaker, and growth was more abundant than in the silent chamber.
Mrs. Retallack also determined that these different musical styles
markedly affected the evaporation rate of distilled water inside the
chambers. From full beakers, fourteen to seventeen milliliters evapo¬
rated over a given time period in the silent chambers, twenty to twenty-
five milliliters vaporized under the influence of Bach, Shankar, and jazz;
but, with rock, the disappearance was fifty-five to fifty-nine milliliters.

When the office of public information at Temple Buell got wind that
Mrs. Retallack was the first grandmother ever to be graduated from its
college, it informed Olga Curtis, a reporter on the Denver Post, about
her extraordinary doings with plants. Mrs. Retallack set up a brand-new
experiment for Curtis in which she compared the effects of rock with
that of string quartets by such twentieth-century composers as Schoen¬
berg, Webern, and Berg. The point of choosing the largely twelve-tone
music of these neo-classicists was to see whether its dissonances, like
those of rock, would also cause the plants to cringe. They did not. Root
examination showed that the specimens in the rock chamber were

scrawny, whereas those subjected to the avant-garde music were compa¬
rable to control plants.

On June 21, 1970, the Post s weekend supplement Empire Magazine

156 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

came out with a color-illustrated four-page spread entitled “Music That
Kills Plants,” which won for Curtis an annual award by the National
Federation of Press Women. Syndicated by Metro Sunday Newspapers,
the piece appeared all over the United States, spawning a new genera¬
tion of articles with such titles as “Bach or Rock: Ask Your Flowers/’
“Mother Is Knitting Earmuffs for Our Petunias,” and more alarmingly,
“It Shouldn’t Happen to Teenagers.” Tying rock music to the prolifera¬
tion of drugs among American youth, one writer for the popular right-
wing Christian Crusade Weekly sanctimoniously wrote: “The Scripture
admonishes the sluggard to go to the ant! Perhaps the druggard should
go to the plant!”

From an avalanche of mail Mrs. Retallack learned that her experi¬
ments had elicited the interest of hundreds of readers, including a passel
of professors who asked for her published scientific works. Spurred by
the unsolicited interest, Retallack, together with Professor Broman,
prepared a nine-page scientific paper, “Response of Growing Plants to
a Manipulation of Their Sonic Environment,” and sent it in to Bio-
Science Magazine, published by the American Institute of Biological
Sciences. They received a turndown, in the form of a review by Dr.
Robert S. Leisner, stating that though one could draw a “highly tenta¬
tive” conclusion that sound affects plant growth, the Retallack-Broman
conclusions were hardly novel in light of the earlier work of Weinberger
and Measures in Ottawa.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Retallack was called by CBS television and asked
to set up a Rock-versus-Shankar experiment for filming with time-lapse
cameras. Almost sick with nervousness lest her charges not deliver their
message for the CBS technicians, Mrs. Retallack was relieved when the
plants performed as if they knew they were scheduled for a nationwide
broadcast. Aired on Walter Cronkite’s newscast on October 16, 1970,
the program added another enormous pile to her correspondence, which
included a number of reports which researchers around the country
wanted to share with her.

From them Dorothy Retallack learned that two North Carolina State
University professors, L. H. Royster, of the Department of Mechanical
and Aerospace Engineering, and B. H. Huang, of the Department of

The Harmonic Life of Plants 157

Biological Engineering, had teamed with C. B. Woodlief, a researcher
at Fiber Industries in the town of Shelby, to perform an experiment
written up in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America as “Effect
of Random Noise on Plant Growth.” The threesome, who realized that
the effects of proliferating noise pollution on animals and man had been
studied but that similar effects on plant systems had been overlooked,
put twelve male sterile tobacco plants into an environmental control
chamber with constant soil and temperature conditions. From a Bruel
and Kraer random-noise generator they harried the plants with noise
frequencies ranging from 31.5 to 20,000 cycles per second and con¬
cluded that growth rate in each plant decreased 40 percent.

Another correspondent was Dr. George Milstein, of Long Island City,
New York, a retired dental surgeon turned teacher of horticulture at the
New York Botanical Garden. After some of his patients had presented
him with exotic plants the names of which no florist could be sure of,
Milstein had dipped into botanical sources, become fascinated with the
vegetal world, and begun growing exotic and colorful Bromeliads, an
extended plant family which includes specimens as diverse as the pineap¬
ple and Spanish moss.

Learning of the Canadian research on wheat, he decided to see how
sopics would affect other plants. Selecting a wide variety of house plants
and two bananas, he subjected them to sonic vibrations delivered di¬
rectly through the air or transduced through the soil of their pots or
through their stems. Assisted by an NBC sound engineer, Milstein
found that a continuous low hum at 3,000 cycles per second accelerated
the growth of most of his subjects and even caused some of them to
bloom six full months ahead of their normal schedule.

When Pip Records, a division of Pickwick International, Inc., asked
him to make a record of stimulatory sounds for plants, it insisted that
the record also contain music. Milstein accordingly embedded the
stimulating hum in the record’s musical selections. In an insert in the
disc’s jacket, “Growing Plants Successfully in the Home,” Milstein,
after giving precise information on the best kind of light, humidity,
ventilation, temperature, watering, fertilizer, and pots, stated that just
as all plant growth and flower development are stimulated by light

158 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

vibrations, so it is logical to assume that the vibrations of sound energy
can also exert a beneficial influence on horticulture. Milstein recom¬
mended that for best results the record be played daily.

When the record attracted attention in the United States and other
countries, Milstein was pestered in the mail and over the telephone by
hundreds of persons who wanted to know what kind of music best suited
plants, and whether his research accorded with that of Dorothy Retal-
lack and tied in with that of Cleve Backster. Milstein blew up. Mrs.
Retallack’s experiments, he says, have nothing to do with science, since
“plants can't hear.” Appalled at what he calls the total fakery of compar¬
ing plants to people, and disgusted at the “dishonesty” on the part of
those promoting the record, he says he is tired of the repeated allegations
that he used music to enhance plant growth.

Asked to comment on Cleve Backster’s work, the dentist turned
horticulturist said: “Backster must be, at best, self-deluded since no one
who has studied botany or physiology could ever agree that plants, whose
tissues differ completely from those of animals and man, have minds or
emotions and can be frightened by a mental threat.”

As secretary of the Society of American Magicians, Milstein, who
performed magic to work his way through college, said he had investi¬
gated hundreds of so-called “psychic phenomena” and never found a
case in which the person claiming a given psychic power could perform
under test conditions. “At least Backster isn’t collecting money the way
some other charlatans are,” said Milstein, “but I don’t want any part
of his research because everything he says he has discovered can be
disproved.”

Milstein’s dogmatic statement was paralleled by those of various
professors at Temple Buell. The New York Times , which published a
feature article on Mrs. Retallack’s work on February 21, 1971, stated
that the academicians seemed to “cringe and die” quite as much as
Dorothy Retallack's acid-rock-exposed plants when it was suggested to
them that Backster could be serious. “They find the whole thing an
excruciating embarrassment,” the Times stated, then quoted one of the
college’s own biologists as saying, “We have been ridiculed profession¬
ally.” Dr. Cleon Ross, a plant physiologist at Colorado State University,

The Harmonic Life of Plants 159

though he reluctantly agreed to discuss the subject of the effect of sonic
energy on plants with the Times reporter, Anthony Ripley, when asked
to comment on Backster’s discovery that plants respond to human

thought, only blurted out: “Pure garbage!”

At Utah State University, Dr. Frank B. Salisbury of the Plant Science
Department was a bit kinder. “1 don’t know what to make of it all,
protested the professor about the effect of music on plants. “It’s been
going on since 1950. There was a report at the 1954 International
Botanical Congress by a man from India who played violins to plants.

I hate to just out-and-out say it’s all baloney, but there’s been an awful
lot of pseudo-science in this field for years. Most of this stuff just doesn’t
have the right kind of experimentation. Until that comes along I don’t
believe any of it”

Her own unequivocal results caused Mrs. Retallack to wonder
whether the nationwide craze for acid rock among the younger genera¬
tion might not be deleterious to their development. Her doubts about
the effects of rock increased when she read an article in the Napa,
California, Register stating that two doctors had reported to the Cali¬
fornia Medical Association that of forty-three musicians playing am¬
plified hard-rock music forty-one had suffered permanent hearing loss.

Some of Denver’s rock buffs also seemed deeply impressed by Mrs.
Retallack’s experiments. One long-haired musician, peering into the
rock-suffused biotronic chamber, said to her: “If rock is doing that to
plants, man, I wonder what it’s doing to me?” Mrs. Retallack wants to
continue her experiments in order to collect enough scientific data to
give the young musician a reasoned answer. One test she envisions will
involve playing musical tapes backward to see if they produce effects
similar to or different from the same tapes played in the normal direc¬
tion.

When she began writing a short book on her experiments. The Sound
of Music and Plants, published in early 1973, Mrs. Retallack was in¬
spired with a line from Oscar Hammerstein she had sung years before
as the star of The Sound of Music in Denver’s summer opera: “The hills
are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung for a
thousand years.”

160 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Delving in libraries to find material with which to give a philosophical
underpinning to her experimental work, she came across a declaration
in the Book of the Secrets of Enoch that everything in the universe, from
the herbs of the field to the stars of the heavens, had its individual spirit
or angel, and noted that Hermes Trismegistus was reputed to have
stated that plants had lives, minds, and souls, even as did animals, men,
and higher beings. Hermes, named “thrice greatest by the Greeks and
from whose name the word “hermetic” is derived, was regarded as the
originator of Egyptian art, science, magic, alchemy, and religion.

That musical sound lies within the very hearts of atoms is the conten¬
tion of a professor of chemistry, now retired after a long career at Johns
Hopkins University, Donald Hatch Andrews. In his book, The Sym¬
phony of Life , Andrews invites readers to join him on an imaginary
journey inside a magnified calcium atom taken from the bone beneath
the tip of his forefinger. Inside the atom, says Andrews, there are shrill
tones dozens of octaves above the highest tones of a violin, the music
of the atomic nucleus, the tiny particle at the center of the atom. If one
listens closely, he continues, one is aware that this music is far more
complex than familiar church music. There are many dissonant chords
like those found in the music of today’s modern composers.

The whole purpose of dissonant music, according to Cyril Meir Scott,
the English composer and theosophist, was to break up thought forms,
which, settling over whole countries and people, turn them stagnant
with lethargy or rampant with madness. It is an occult musical fact, says
Scott, that discord—used in its moral sense—can alone be destroyed by
discord, the reason for this being that the vibrations of intrinsically
beautiful music are too rarefied to touch the comparatively coarse vibra¬
tions of all that pertains to a much lower plane,

So far, no researcher with the exception of Hans Kayser, the German
author of Harmonia Plantarum and other mathematically learned books
on the relation of sound intervals to the growth of plants, seems to have
become interested in the octaval correspondences between the shapes
of plants and musical notes. Kayser observed that if one projects all tones
within the space of one octave—in the same manner that the astrono¬
mer and astrologer Johannes Kepler worked out in his Harmonice Mundi

The Harmonic Life of Plants 161

for the solar planetary system—and sketches their angles in a specific
way, one obtains the prototype of leaf form. The interval of the octave,
the basis for music making and indeed all sensation, thus contains within
itself the form of the leaf.

Not only does this observation lend new “psychological” support to
Goethe’s metamorphosis of plants, which derive their development
from the leaf form, but it casts new light on the ingenious classificatory
system developed by Linnaeus. When one considers, says Kayser, that
a passion flower contains two ratios, a /ive-part petal and stamen arrange¬
ment and a three-pait pistil, even if one rejects a logically reasoning
intelligence, one must admit that in the soul of plants are certain
form-carrying prototypes—in the passion flower’s case musical thirds
and fifths—which work, as in music, to shape the blossom forms as
intervals. It is from this point of view that Linnaeus’ system acquires a
“psychic” rehabilitation, concludes Kayser, for, with his “sexual classifi¬
cation scheme, the famous Swedish botanist hit on the psychic nerve of
plants.

What humans are able to perceive consciously with their limited
senses is but a minute fraction of what vibrationally affects them. The
so-called scentless daisy may be as sweet-smelling as the rose—if people
had the olfactory ability to detect the particles the daisy throws off.

'i

Efforts to prove that a given sonic vibration will affect plants or man
may, far from resolving the interaction of music and life, be only unravel¬
ing a wondrously resonating tapestry of influences into its separate,
unrelated threads.

162 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Just as plants respond to the wavelengths of music, so also are they
continually being affected by wavelengths of the electromagnetic spec¬
trum, from earth, moon, planets, cosmos and from a proliferation of
man-made devices; only it remains to be established exactly which are
beneficial and which are harmful.

One evening in the late 1720s a French writer and astronomer,
Jean-Jacques Dertous de Mairan, was watering a series of pet Mimosa
pudica in his Paris drawing room when he noticed to his surprise that
the disappearance of the sun appeared to be causing the sensitive plants
to fold their leaves just as they did when touched by his hand. A true

searcher, esteemed by his contemporary Voltaire, Mairan did not in¬
stantly conclude that his plants were “simply going to sleep” as darkness
fell. Instead he waited for the sun to rise again and put two of the
mimosas in a pitch-dark closet. At noon he noticed that their leaves
remained wide open; but at sunset they shut just as promptly as the ones
on the drawing-room table. The plants, concluded Mairan, must be able

to “sense” the sun without “seeing” it.

As to the cause of this effect, Mairan—whose scientific investigations
ranged from the rotational movement of the moon and the physical
properties of the aurora borealis to the reason for light in phosphors and
the peculiarities of the number 9—could offer no solution. In his report
to the French Academy he lamely suggested that his plants must be
under the influence of an unknown factor in the universe, and that
because hospitalized patients seemed to get extremely weak at certain
times they too might be subject to the same force.

Some two and a half centuries later, Dr. John Ott, who runs the
Environmental Health and Light Research Institute at Sarasota,
Florida, was struck by Mairan’s observations, which he was able to
confirm, and wondered if this “unknown energy” could penetrate a

massive amount of earth, the only shield known to be able to block

*

so-called “cosmic radiation.”

Ott took six mimosa plants down a mine shaft at noon to a point 650
feet beneath the earth’s surface. Unlike those in the dark of Mairan’s
closet, Ott’s subterranean specimens immediately closed their leaves
without waiting for sunset; they did so even when incandescent bulbs
were lit all around them. Except for the fact that he related the phe¬
nomenon to electromagnetism, of which little was known in Mairan s
time, Ott was as much in the dark about the cause of it as had been his
eighteenth-century French predecessor.

Mairan’s contemporaries had known about electricity only what the
Hellenes had passed on to them concerning the properties of amber, or
electron, as they called it, which when vigorously rubbed attracted a
feather or a piece of straw. Before Aristotle, it had been known that
lodestone, a black ferrous oxide, could also exert an equally inexplicable
attraction on iron filings. Since this material was found in liberal quanti-

164 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

ties in a region of Asia Minor called Magnesia, it was dubbed magnes
Uthos , or magnesian stone, a term shortened to magnes in Latin and to
magnet in English.

First to link electricity and magnetism was the sixteenth-century
savant William Gilbert, whose medical skill and philosophical erudition
won him appointment as personal physician to Queen Elizabeth I.
Announcing that the planet itself was a globular magnet, Gilbert at¬
tributed to the lodestone a “soul,” since it was “part and choice offspring
of its animate mother, the earth.” Gilbert also discovered that materials
other than amber could be caused to attract light objects if friction was
applied to them. He designated them “electrics” and coined the term

“electric force.”

For centuries the attractive forces in amber and lodestone were
thought to be “penetrating etheric fluids” (whatever they might be),
emitted by the substances, Even fifty years after Mairan’s experiments,
Joseph Priestley, known principally as the discoverer of oxygen, wrote
in his popular textbook on electricity:

The earth and all the bodies we are acquainted with, without exception,
are supposed to contain a certain quantity of an exceedingly elastic and
subtle fluid which philosophers have agreed to term electric. The moment
any body becomes possessed of more or less than its natural quantity, very
remarkable effects arise from it. The body is said to be electrified and is
capable of exhibiting appearances which are ascribed to the power of
electricity.

By the twentieth century real knowledge about magnetism had pro¬
gressed very little. As Professor Silvanus Thompson stated in his Robert
Boyle lecture just before World War I, “Those occult qualities of mag¬
netism which for centuries have excited the admiration of mankind are
still occult, not in the sense only that they need to be investigated by
experiment, but that their ultimate cause still remains unexplained.” In
a text published right after World War II by Chicago’s Museum of
Science and Industry, it is stated that human beings still do not know
why the earth is a magnet, how magnetic materials can be mechanically
affected by other magnets at a distance from them, why electric currents
have magnetic fields about them, or even why tiny atoms of matter,

Plants and Electromagnetism 165

small as they are, occupy such empty but prodigious volumes of energy-
packed space.

In the three and one half centuries since Gilbert's famous work De
Magnete was published, many theories have been proposed to explain
the origin of geomagnetism but none is satisfactory.

The same can be said for contemporary physics, which has substituted
for the idea of an “etheric fluid" a spectrum of undulating radiations
called “electromagnetic radiations," ranging from enormous macropul¬
sations, lasting several hundred thousand years each, with wavelengths
millions of miles long, to super-rapid energy pulses alternating
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times a second, with wavelengths mea¬
suring an infinitesimal ten billionths of a centimeter. The first type are
associated with such phenomena as the reversal of the earth's magnetic
field, the second with the collision of atoms, usually those of helium and
hydrogen, moving at incredibly high speeds and converted to radiant
energy termed “cosmic rays." In between lie countless bands of energy
waves, including gamma rays, originating in the nuclei of atoms; X-rays,
originating in their shells; a collection of frequencies which because they
can be perceived with the eye are called light; those used in radio, TV,
radar, and a growing multitude of applications from space research to
electronic cooking.

The electromagnetic waves differ from sound waves in that they can
travel not only through matter but through “nothing,” racing at a speed
of 186 million miles per second through vast regions of the cosmos
which previously was thought to contain a medium called “ether" but
is now held to be almost a perfect vacuum. But no one has yet explained
exactly how they travel. As one eniment physicist complained to the
authors, “We just don't know the mechanism for the damn thing."

In 1747, fean Antoine Nollet, a French abbot and physics tutor to
the dauphin, was informed by a German physicist in Wittenberg that
water, which normally issued drop by drop from a capillary tube, would
run out in a constant stream if the tube was electrified. After repeating
the German’s experiments and adding some of his own, Nollet, as he
later put it, “began to believe that this electrical virtue employed in a
certain manner might have some remarkable effect on organized bodies

166 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

which can be looked upon, in some way, as hydraulic machines prepared
by nature itself." Nollet put several plants in metallic pots next to a
conductor and was intrigued to note that the rate of their transpiration
increased. In a long series of experiments, Nollet carefully weighed not
only daffodils but sparrows, pigeons, and cats and found they lost weight
faster if electrified.

Wondering how electrical phenomena might influence seeds, Nollet
planted several dozen mustard grains in two tin containers and elec¬
trified one of them from 7 to 10 a m. and from 3 to 8 p.m. seven days
running. At the end of the week, every grain in the electrified container
had sprouted and grown to an average height of 15 to 16 French lignes;
the ligne is an old French measure, the twelfth part of an inch, or about
2.25 millimeters. Of the nonelectrified seeds the three which had broken
ground were only 2 to 3 lignes tall. Though he had no idea why, Nollet
could only suggest in his book-long report to the French Academy that
electricity somehow had profound effects on the growth functions of life
forms.

Nollet’s conclusion was formulated a few years before the announce¬
ment rocked Europe that Benjamin Franklin had been able to collect
a charge of electricity from lightning by flying a kite during stormy
weather outside Philadelphia. When the bolt struck a metal point on the
kite’s frame, it had run down the kite's wet string into a Leyden bottle,
a device developed in 1746 at the University of Leyden, whereby elec¬
tricity could be stored in water and discharged in a single sudden burst.
Theretofore, only static electricity obtained with an electrostatic genera¬
tor had been storable in a Leyden jar.

As Franklin was now collecting electricity from clouds, the brilliant
astronomer Pierre Charles Lemonnier, who was admitted to the French
Academy at twenty-one and later acclaimed for his discovery of the
obliquity of the ecliptic, determined that a permanent state of electrical
activity exists in the earth’s atmosphere even on a clear and sunny day,
but exactly how the omnipresent charges interact with plants remained
veiled in mystery.

The next efforts to adapt atmospheric electricity to the fructification
of plants came in Italy. In 1770 a Professor Gardini stretched a number

Plants and Electromagnetism 167

of wires above a productive monastery garden in Turin. Within a short
time, many of the plants began to wither and die. When the monks
dismantled the wires, the garden revived. Gardini hypothesized that
either the plants had been deprived of a natural supply of electricity
necessary to their growth or that they had received an overdose. When
Gardini heard from France that the brothers Joseph-Michel and
Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier had sent aloft an enormous balloon filled
with heated air to carry two passengers on a ten-kilometer, twenty-five-
minute trip over Paris, he recommended that this new invention be
practically applied to horticulture by attaching a long wire to it along
which electricity could be conducted from great heights into fields and
gardens below.

These French and Italian reports caused little stir among the scientific
pundits of the day, who, even then, were beginning to pay more atten¬
tion to the effects of electricity on inert, rather than on living, bodies.
Nor were they impressed when yet another clergyman, Abbe Bertholon,
came out in 1783 with a full-scale treatise, De I’Electricite des Vegctaux.
A professor of experimental physics at French and Spanish universities,
Bertholon gave strong support to Noilet’s idea that by altering the
viscosity, or flow resistance, of fluids in living organisms electricity could
change their growth functions. He cited the report of an Italian physi¬
cist, Giuseppe Toaldo, that in a row of jasmine bushes the two which
were next to a lightning conductor grew thirty feet tall whereas all the
others attained only four feet.

Bertholon, who was considered something of a sorcerer, had a gar¬
dener stand on a slab of insulating material and sprinkle vegetables from
an electrified watering can, He reported that his salads grew to an
extraordinary size. He also invented what he called an “electrovegetome-
ter” to collect atmospheric electricity by means of an antenna, and pass
it through plants growing in a field. “This instrument,” he wrote, is
applicable to all kinds of vegetal production, everywhere, in all weather;
and its utility and efficacity cannot be ignored or doubted except by
timid souls who are not inspired by discoveries and who will never push
back the barriers of the sciences but will remain eternally within the
narrow confines of a cowardly pusillanimity which, to palliate it, is too

168 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

often given the name of prudence.” In his conclusion, the abbot boldly
suggested that one day the best fertilizer for plants would come in

electrical form “free from the sky.

The exciting notion that living things interacted and indeed were

imbued with electricity advanced a giant step in November, 1780, when
the wife of a Bolognese scientist, Luigi Galvani, accidentally discovered
that a machine used to generate static electricity caused the severed leg
of a frog to jump spasmodically. When his attention was called to it,
Galvani was surprised and instantly wondered whether electricity was
not in fact a manifestation of life. Deciding on Christmas Day that it
was, he wrote in his workbook: “The electrical fluid should be considered

a means to excite nervo-muscular force.”

For the next six years Galvani worked on the effects on muscular

motion of electricity until he happened accidentally to discover that his
frogs' legs would twitch just as well without the application of an electric
charge if the copper wires they hung from were blown by the wind
against an iron railing. Realizing that the electricity in the three-part
circuit had to be coming from the legs or the metals, Galvani, who
believed it to be a living rather than a dead force, decided it was
associated with the animal tissue and ascribed the reaction to a vital fluid
or energy in the frogs' bodies which he termed animal electricity.

Galvani's findings at first received warm support from his compatriot
Alessandro Volta, a physicist at the University of Pavia in the Duchy
of Milan. But when Volta repeated Galvani’s experiments and found he
could elicit the electrical effect only when two different metals were
used, he wrote to Abbot Tommaselli that it was obvious that the elec¬
tricity came, not from the frog’s legs, but from “the simple application
of two metals of different quality.” Concentrating on the electrical
properties of metals, Volta was led in 1800 to the invention of a pile of
alternating zinc and copper discs with a piece of wet paper sandwiched
between each two layers. Instantly chargeable, it could be used to pro¬
duce electric current at will, not only once, like the Leyden jar, but
thousands of times, and thus for the first time researchers were freed
from their dependence on static or natural electricity. This first ancestor
of our electric storage cell disclosed an artificial dynamic or kinetic

Plants and Electromagnetism 169

electricity, which all but obliterated Galvani’s notion of a special vital
energy in living tissues.

Though at first Volta had accepted Galvani's findings, he later wrote:
“If we deprive animal organs of any electrical activity of their own and
abandon this attractive idea which Galvani’s beautiful experiments sug¬
gested, these organs can be regarded simply as electrometers of a new
kind and of a marvelous sensitivity.” Despite Galvani’s prophetic asser¬
tion, just before his death, that one day the analysis of all the necessary
physiological aspects of his experiments “would provide better knowl¬
edge of the nature of the life forces, their different duration, according
to variations in sex, age, temperament, illnesses, and even the very
constitution of the atmosphere,” scientists neglected his theories and
denied them in practice.

A few years earlier, unknown to Galvani, the Hungarian Jesuit Max¬
imilian Hell had revived Gilbert’s idea of “soul-like” characteristics in
the lodestone being transmitted to ferrous metals; and with this idea had
invented a singular arrangement of magnetized steel plates to cure his
own persistent rheumatism. His friend the Viennese physician Franz
Anton Mesmer, who picked up an interest in magnetism by reading
Paracelsus, was impressed with Hell’s subsequent cures of a variety of
afflictions in others, and embarked on a long series of experiments to
check them. In so doing Mesmer became convinced that living matter
had a property susceptible to being acted upon by “earthly and celestial
magnetic forces,” which in 1779 he called “animal magnetism” and to
which he devoted a doctoral thesis entitled “The Influence of the
Planets on the Human Body.” Learning that a Swiss priest, J. J. Gassner,
was healing patients by touch, Mesmer successfully adopted Gassner's
technique and proclaimed that some people, himself included, were
better endowed with the “magnetic” force than others.

Though it seemed that these startling discoveries of bioelectrical and
biomagnetic energy might open the door to a new age of research which
could unite physics with medicine and physiology, the door was again
slammed shut for more than a century. Mesmer’s success in treating
cases, where others had failed, provoked his Viennese medical colleagues
to jealousy. Attributing his cures to witchcraft and the devil, they orga-

170 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

nized a commission to investigate his claims. When the commission
reported unfavorably, Mesmer was expelled from the medical faculty
and told to give up his practice.

Moving in 1778 to Paris, where he found “people more enlightened
and less indifferent to new discoveries,” he made a powerful convert to
his new methods of Charles D’Eslon, first physician to the court of the
brother of Louis XVI, who introduced Mesmer to influential circles. It
was not long before the French physicians grew as angry and jealous as
had their Austrian counterparts. Their clamor forced the king to appoint
a royal commission to investigate Mesmer’s claims, despite the fact that
D’Eslon at a meeting of the medical faculty of the University of Paris
had championed Mesmer’s scientific contribution as “one of the most
important of our age.” When the commission, whose members included
the director of the French Academy of Sciences—which in 1772 had
solemnly ruled that meteorites did not exist—and whose chairman was
the American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, returned a verdict that
“animal magnetism is nonexistent and can have no salubrious effect,
Mesmer’s great popularity, held up to public ridicule, began to wane.
Retiring to Switzerland, he completed, one year before his death in
1815, his most important work: Mesmerism or the System of Reciprocal
Influences; or The Theory and Practice of Animal Magnetism .

In 1820; Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish scientist, found that a
compass needle placed near a current-carrying wire always turned so that
the needle became perpendicular to the wire. When the current was
reversed, the compass needle pointed in the opposite direction. The fact
that a force could act on the compass needle indicated that a magnetic
field existed in the space around the wire. This led to one of the most
profitable discoveries in the history of science when Michael Faraday in
England and Joseph Henry in the United States independently realized
the opposite phenomenon was equally valid, that a magnetic field could
induce an electric current if the wire were moved through it. Thus the
“generator” was invented, and with it a whole new world of electrical

appliances.

Today, books on what man can do with electricity fill seventeen
100-foot shelves of stacks in the Library of Congress, but what electricity

Plants and Electromagnetism 171

is and why it functions are as much a mystery as they were in Priestley’s
day. Modern scientists still have no idea of the composition of electro¬
magnetic waves. They simply use them for radio, radar, television and
toasters.

Because of such a lopsided concentration on the mechanical proper¬
ties of electromagnetism, only a corporal’s guard of individuals has paid
attention over the years to how and why electromagnetism might affect
living things. A notable exception was Baron Karl von Reichenbach, a
German scientist from Tubingen who in 1845 had discovered wood-tar
products, including creosote, used for the preservation of above-ground
fencing and underwater pilings. He became aware that specially gifted
persons whom he termed “sensitives” could actually see a strange energy
emanating from all living things and even from the ends of bar magnets;
this energy he called Odyle or Od. But, though his works were translated
into English by a distinguished medical doctor, William Gregory, ap¬
pointed professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh in 1844,
as Researches into the Forces of Magnetism , Electricity , Heat and Light
in Relation to the Force of Life , his attempts to prove its existence to
his physicist contemporaries in England and on the continent were
rejected out of hand.

Reichenbach indicated the reason why his “odic force” was spurned

4 .

when he wrote: “Whenever I began to touch on the subject, I felt at
once that I was harping on a string of an unpleasant tone. They coupled
Od and sensitivity in their minds with so-called ‘animal magnetism' and
‘Mesmerism’ and with that all sympathy was at an end.” The coupling
was entirely unjustified, in that Reichenbach had clearly stated that
though the mysterious odic force might resemble animal magnetism and
was associated with it, it also could exist quite independently.

Years later, Wilhelm Reich contended that “the energy with which
the ancient Greeks and the moderns since Gilbert were dealing was a
basically different energy from that with which the physicists are dealing
since Volta and Faraday, one obtained by the movement of wires in
magnetic fields; different not only with regard to the principle of its
production, but fundamentally different.”

Reich believed that the ancient Greeks, with the principle of friction,

172 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

had discovered the mysterious energy to which he gave the name “or-
gone,” so similar to Reichenbach’s Od and to the ether of the ancients.
Reich claimed that orgone is the medium in which light moves, and the
medium for electromagnetic and gravitational activity, that it fills all
space, though in different degrees and concentration, and is even pre¬
sent in vacuums. He considered it the basic link between inorganic and
organic matter. By the 1960s, shortly after Reich’s death, the evidence
for the electrical basis of organisms was becoming overwhelming. As
D. S. Halacy, a writer on orthodox science, praided it simply: “The flow
of electrons is basic to practically all life processes.

The difficulties encountered in the period between Reichenbach and
Reich stemmed partly from the vogue in science for taking things apart,
rather than studying them as functioning wholes. Simultaneously the
gulf widened between workers in what came to be known as the “life
sciences” and physicists who more and more would believe only what
they could see or instrumentally measure. In between, chemistry con¬
centrated on increasingly varied and smaller separate entities, which in
their artificial recombination offered a cornucopia of fascinating new

products.

The first artificial synthesis in the laboratory of an organic substance,
urea, in 1828, seemed to destroy the idea that there was a special “vital”
aspect in living things. The discovery of cells, the purported biological
counterparts of the atoms of classical Greek philosophy, suggested that
plants, animals, and man himself were merely different associations of
these building blocks or chemical aggregates. In this new climate, few
took initiative to delve deeper into the effects of electromagnetism on
life. Nevertheless, individualistic mavericks occasionally brought for¬
ward an idea on how plants might respond to external cosmic forces and
thus kept the findings of Nollet and Bertholon from expiring.

Across the Atlantic in North America, William Ross, testing claims
of the Marquis of Anglesey that seeds sprouted faster when electrified,
planted cucumbers in a mixture of black manganese oxide, table salt, and
clean sand, watered with dilute sulphuric acid. When he applied an
electric current to the mixture, the seeds sprouted well ahead of those
in a similar but nonelectrified mixture. A year later, in 1845, the first

Plants and Electromagnetism 173

issue of the London Journal of the Horticultural Society published a long
account of the “Influence of Electricity on Vegetation” by an agrono¬
mist, Edward Solly, who, like Gardini, suspended wires in the air over
garden plots, and, like Ross, tried burying them under the soil. But of
Solly’s seventy experiments with various grains, vegetables, and flowers,
only nineteen were of any benefit, and nearly as many were harmful.

The conflicting results of these researchers made it obvious that the
amount, quality, and duration of electrical stimulation was of crucial
importance to each form of vegetal life. But since physicists lacked
instrumentation to measure its specific effects, and still knew little about
how electricity, artificial or atmospheric, actually operated on plants, the
experimental field was left to persistently curious horticulturalists or
out-and-out cranks. Still, various observations showing that vegetation
had an electric quality continued to be recorded.

In 1859 an issue of the London Gardeners’ Chronicle published a
report of light flashes passing from one scarlet verbena to another and
noted that the phenomenon could best be seen during crepuscular
periods when a thunderstorm approached after a long spell of dry
weather. This validated an observation of Goethe’s that the flowers of
oriental poppies could be seen flashing at dusk.

It was not until the latter part of the century that new vistas were
opened in Germany onto the exact nature of the electricity in the air
which Lemonnier had discovered. Julius Elster and Hans Geitel, who
specialized in the spontaneous emission of radiation from inorganic
substances which was coming to be called “radioactivity,” began a vast
study of atmospheric electricity. This disclosed that the soil of the earth
continually emits electrically charged particles into the air. Called ions
from the neuter present participle of the Greek verb, tenai, meaning “to
go,” these particles were either atoms, groups of atoms, or molecules
regarded as having a net positive or negative charge after gaining or
losing electrons. Lemonnier’s observation that the atmosphere was con¬
tinually filled with electricity at last had some kind of material explana¬
tion.

Since on a clear day in good weather the earth has a negative electrical
charge while the atmosphere is positive, electrons stream skyward from

174 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

the soil and plants. During storms the polarity is reversed, the earth
becoming positive and the base of the cloud layer negative. Because
there are at any time an estimated three to four thousand electrical
storms raging over the surface of the globe, the charges lost by the earth
in those areas favored by balmy weather are thus replaced, and a seesaw¬
ing balance of electrical gradients maintained.

As a result of the ever-present flow of electricity, the voltage, or
electric pressure, increases at higher altitudes. Between the head of a
six-foot man and the ground he stands on, it is 200 volts; from the top
of the Empire State Building to the sidewalks around it, 40,000 volts;
in the interval between the lowest layers of the ionosphere and the
earth’s surface, 360,000 volts. Though this sounds dangerous, not much
shocking power can be generated because there is little current flow. The
chief difficulty in harnessing this vast reservoir of energy and putting it
to work is lack of precise knowledge of exactly how it functions and of

the laws which govern its operations.

A new attack on the application of atmospheric electricity to the
growth of plants began when a Finnish scientist of eclectic interests,
Selim Lemstrom, made four expeditions to the subpolar regions of
Spitsbergen, northern Norway, and Lapland from 1868 to 1884. An
expert on polar light and earth magnetism, Lemstrom theorized that the
luxuriant vegetation in those latitudes, which popular opinion ascribed
to the lengthened days of their summers, was actually attributable to
what he called “that violent electrical manifestation, the aurora bo-

rcslis/*

As it had been known from the time of Franklin that sharp points
were especially attractive to atmospheric electricity—an observation
which led to the development of the lightning rod—Lemstrom reasoned
that “the sharp points of plants acted like lightning rods to collect
atmospheric electricity and facilitate the exchange of charges of the air
and the ground.” Lemstrom conducted studies on the rings in cross-
sections of fir-tree trunks and found that the annual growth fully cor¬
related with periods of high aurora and sunspot activity, the effects being

most pronounced as one traveled north.

When he came home to verify these observations by experimentation,

Plants and Electromagnetism 175

Lemstrom connected a series of flowers in metal pots to a static genera¬
tor by an overhead network of wires sixteen inches above them and a
pole set into the soil as a ground. Other pots he “left to nature.” After
eight weeks, the electrified plants showed gains in weight of nearly 50
percent over their electrically deprived neighbors. When he transferred
his apparatus into a garden he not only more than doubled the yield of
strawberries but found them to be much sweeter; his harvest from barley
plants increased by one-third.

In a long series of experiments conducted as far south as Burgundy,
Lemstrom’s results varied not only with specific vegetables, fruits, and
cereals but alsc with temperature, moisture, and the natural fertility and
manuring of the soil. Lemstrom reported his success in 1902 in a book
Electro Cultur, published in Berlin, and the term was included in Lib¬
erty Hyde Bailey’s Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture.

The English translation of Lerr.strom’s book, entitled Electricity in
Agriculture and Horticulture, which appeared in London two years after
the German original, acerbically, yet truthfully, as it turned out, warned
in its introduction that, since the whole complicated subject was con¬
nected with no less than three separate sciences, physics, botany, and
agronomy, it might not seem “particularly attractive” to scientists. This
caveat was not needed for one of his readers, Sir Oliver Lodge. After
achieving singular distinction in the field of physics, Lodge went on to
demonstrate his open-mindedness by joining the London Society for
Psychical Research and brought out a dozen books which advanced his
conviction that whole worlds lay beyond the physical.

Lodge determined to obviate Lemstrom’s time-consuming difficulties
in moving his wire network upward as his plants grew; to allow the
movement of people, animals, and farm equipment through his elec¬
trified fields, he suspended his grid on insulators attached to high poles.
During one growing season Lodge was able to increase the per-acre yield
of Canadian Red Fife wheat by 40 percent and was pleased that the
bakers who used flour ground from it claimed it produced bread of a far
better quality than that made from the wheat they were normally fur¬
nished.

After working with Lodge, his collaborator, John Newman, adapted

176 TUNED TO THE MUSIC Or THE SPHERES

the system to achieve over 20 percent increase in wheat yields in Eve¬
sham, England, and in potatoes dug at Dumfries, Scotland. Newman’s
strawberries were not only vastly more productive than nonelectrified
equivalents but, like Lemstrom’s, were more succulent and sweet; his
sugar beets tested out as having greater than normal sugar content. Of
passing interest, Newman published his report, not in a botanical jour¬
nal, but in the fifth edition of the Standard Handbook for Electrical
Engineers , brought out by McGraw-Hill in New York. Ever since, it has
been more the engineering fraternity than the plant men who have
assiduously pursued electrocultural efforts.

Plants and Electromagnetism 177

CHAPTER 12

Force F ields,
Humans and Plants

Because their profession calls upon them for practical solutions to prob¬
lems no matter how difficult they appear at first glance, engineers, unlike
researchers in pure science, are less concerned with why or how some¬
thing works than with whether it will work. This attitude frees them
from the shackles of theory, which in the history of science has often
caused pedants to disregard the brilliant new findings of geniuses be¬
cause there was no theoretical basis to support them.

When an ingenious Hungarian refugee, Joseph Molitorisz, who es¬
caped from his Soviet-occupied homeland and took an engineering
degree, came across Abbe Nollet’s ideas about electro-osmosis, he started

thinking about how the Frenchman's efforts could be applied to agricul¬
tural problems. It seemed strange to Molitorisz that a redwood can raise
its sap more than three hundred feet whereas the best man-designed
suction pump can pull water up less than a tenth of that distance. There
was evidently something about trees and electricity that defied laws of
hydrodynamics in standard engineering. At an agricultural research sta¬
tion run by the U.S. Government near Riverside, California, Molitorisz
decided to adapt what he had learned from Nollet’s insights to citrus
orchards. In an early experiment, he ran current through citrus seed¬
lings. When the current flowed in one direction, the growth of the tiny
trees was speeded up; when the direction was reversed, the seedlings
shriveled. Evidently, the electricity somehow abetted the natural flow of
electric current present in the plants or, when severed, blocked it. In
another experiment, partly inspired by his reading of Abbe Bertholon,
Molitorisz applied a fifty-eight-volt current to six branches of an orange
tree but left another six branches untouched, only to discover that
within eighteen hours sap was freely circulating in the “powered”
branches while in the untouched branches there was very little sap flow.

One of the problems of harvesting oranges is the fact that their fruit
does not all ripen simultaneously and must be laboriously hand-picked
over many days if it is not to rot on the branches. Molitorisz theorized
that picking costs might be reduced if he could get a tree to drop its
ripe fruit through electrical stimulation. By wiring one orange tree to a
source of direct current, he got it to drop its ripe fruit but retain the
still-green oranges on its branches. Even with this success he could not
get funds for additional experimentation; but Molitorisz, who has also
invented an “electrical flower pot” which can keep flowers alive much
longer than is normally possible, believes that one day it will be easy to
harvest electrically the fruit of an entire citrus orchard and obviate the
necessity of raising pickers into the trees.

While Molitorisz was working on the West Coast, another engineer,
Dr. Larry E. Murr, of the Materials Research Laboratory at the Pennsyl¬
vania State University, became the first to simulate artificially in the
laboratory the electrical conditions of short thunderstorms and long
periods of rainy weather. After seven years of work in his man-made

Force Fields, Humans and Plants 179

“mini-climate,” he was able to get significant increases in plant growth
by carefully regulating the voltage field strength over plants in lucite pots
set on an aluminum plate to serve as one electrode, the other supplied
by an aluminum wire mesh hung from insulating poles. Other voltages,
he found, severely damaged the leaves of plants. Murr reached the
conclusion that “whether or not we can augment acreage yield by
maintaining artificially devised electric fields over crop areas is still a
matter for speculation. The cost of achieving such gains by large-scale
outdoor installations might be much more than they are worth. Never¬
theless, the possibility exists.”

Dr. George Starr White, who published a book entitled Cosmo-
electric Culture , discovered that metals like iron and tin could facilitate
plant growth if bright pieces were dangled from fruit trees. His evidence
was corroborated by Randall Groves Hay, an industrial engineer from
fenkintown. New Jersey. Where Hay attached metallic Christmas tree
balls to tomato plants, they would bear their fruits earlier than normal.
In his own words: “At first, my wife would not let me hang the balls
on the plants because she said it would look just too ridiculous. But when
fifteen potted tomatoes hung with balls started to ripen in cold, inclem¬
ent weather long before those of any other grower, she allowed me to

* continue.”

The experiments of James Lee Scribner, an electronic engineer in
Greenville, South Carolina, who worked thirty years in radio with elec¬
tronic bathing of seeds, have resulted in a rival to Jack s beanstalk.
Scribner wired an aluminum pot to an ordinary electric outlet. Spread
between the electrodes was a wet metallic mix made up of millions of
zinc and copper particles, which, when dried, allowed electricity to filter
between the electrode strips. A butterbean planted in the pot grew to
the amazing height of twenty-two feet, though similar beans normally
never exceed two feet. At maturity it produced two bushels of delicious
beans. Scribner believes that

it is the electron that is responsible before the photosynthesis can take
place, for it is the electron that magnetizes the chlorophyll in the plant
cell that makes it possible for the photon to assert itself and become a
part of the plant in the form of solar energy. It is also this magnetism that

180 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

draws the molecules of oxygen into the ever expanding chlorophyll cells
of the plant, and so we must assume that moisture is in no way integrated
into the plant through any absorption process whatsoever, for the integra¬
tion of moisture is purely an electronic one. The so-called root pressure
(moisture droplets) appearing on plant surfaces is not root pressure at all,

but an abundance of electrons working with the rather excessive water
energy in the bed.

Scribner s findings on seeds had apparently been anticipated in the
1930s, when the Italian Bindo Riccioni developed his own system for
electrically treating seeds at the rate of five tons per day by allowing
them to flow through parallel plate capacitors at about five meters per
second. From the treated seeds Riccioni reported harvests from 2 to 37
percent greater than the national average, depending on soil and
weather conditions. His work was interrupted by World War II, and his
12 7'P a £> e hook, translated into English only in 1960, does not thus far
seem to have stimulated further experimentation in the United States
or Western Europe.

In the Soviet Union, however, a commercial processing plant to treat
seeds with electrical energy, with a 2-ton-per-hour capacity, was reported
in 1963, Results indicated that yields for the green mass of corn jumped
15 to 20 percent over the average, oats and barley 10 to 15 percent, peas
13 percent, and buckwheat 8 to 10 percent. What promise this pilot
project might hold to relieve Russia’s persistent grain shortages was not
mentioned. To an agricultural industry which has relied almost wholly
on artificially produced chemicals not only to fertilize its soil but to rid
its crops of marauding pests, the electrocultural horizons being opened
up afresh by engineers seem either unnecessary or a threat. This explains
why almost no money has been made available for more investigation.

A former director of the United States Department of Agriculture’s
Division of Agricultural Engineering Research, E. G. McKibben, com¬
plained as far back as 1962 that this policy was extremely short-sighted.
In an address to the American Society of Agricultural Engineers McKib¬
ben said: “The importance and the possibilities of the application of
electromagnetic energy in its many forms to agriculture are limited only
by the creative imagination and physical resources available. Electro-

Force Fields, Humans and Plants 181

magnetic energy is probably the most basic form. It, or something
closely related to it, appears to be the basic substance of all energy and
all matter and the essential fabric of all plant and animal life,” McKib-
ben stressed that as yet undreamed-of developments and accomplish¬
ments might be reasonably attained if only much more support was put
behind electrocultural efforts; but his plea has thus far fallen on deaf

ears.

Even before McKibben made his appeal, brand-new discoveries about
the influence of magnetism on vegetation were coming to light. In 1960
L. J. Audus, a professor of botany at London University’s Bedford
College, while trying to find out exactly how plants respond to gravity,
stumbled onto the fact that their roots are sensitive to magnetic fields
and published a pioneering paper, “Magnetotropism, a New Plant
Growth Response,” in Nature. Nearly simultaneously, two Russians,
A. V. Krylov and G. A. Tarakanova, issued their report in Moscow,
showing that tomatoes ripen inexplicably faster nearer the south than
the north pole of a magnet.

In Canada, Dr. U. J. Pittman, of the Agricultural Research Station
in Lethbridge, Alberta, had observed all across the North American
continent that the roots of various domestic and wild cereal grains, as
well as those of a number of species of weeds, consistently aligned
themselves in a north-south plane parallel to the horizontal force of the
earth’s magnetic field. He found that the earth’s magnetism speeded up
the germination of Chinook and Kharkov wheat, Compana barley, Eagle
oats. Redwood flax, and common fall rye if the long axes of the seeds
and embryo ends were oriented toward the north magnetic pole. “When
Granny insisted that her pumpkin seeds be planted pointing north,”
wrote Pittman in Crops and Soils Magazine, “she may have been dead
right!”

In the United States, the possibility of large-scale application of the
occult force of magnetism to agriculture arose when in Denver,
Colorado, still another engineer, Dr. H. Len Cox, chanced to read an
article in a 1968 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology which
reported that infrared photos taken from NASA satellites seemed to
indicate that wheat plants attacked by pests, or otherwise incapacitated,

182 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

had an entirely different “electromagnetic signature” from those in a
field expected to produce a bumper crop. Intrigued by a phenomenon
for which he had no explanation, Cox, a space scientist, after dipping
into the electrocultural literature, asked a metallurgist friend whether he

knew of any magnetizable substance which could make plants grow
faster and more fruitfully.

When the metallurgist suggested that deposits of a useless ferrous ore,
magnetite, totaling billions of tons, were easily accessible in nearby
Wyoming, Cox brought back a truckload and ground it into powder.
After charging it in a magnetic field of undisclosed strength and mixing
it with trace minerals, he sifted it into the soil of a garden plot where
it could come into contact with the roots of red and white radishes.
Though the green tops of the maturing plants seemed no different from
similar radishes allowed to grow normally in a neighboring plot, when
Cox pulled his “activated” vegetables from the ground, he saw results
beyond his wildest expectations. Not only were the activated radishes on
an average twice as large as the controls, but the fact that their tap roots
were three to four times as long indicated that root stimulation seemed
to have produced the increased growth. The remarkable effect on
radishes was also obtained for other root vegetables, such as rutabagas,
turnips, and carrots, and also for green plants such as beans, lettuce,
broccoli, and oyster plant.

When Cox’s Electroculture Corporation began selling the new prod¬
uct in ten-pound cans in 1970, users reported not only that they got
much larger yields but that the vegetables produced had a far better
flavor, corroborating Lemstrom’s report on his strawberries and Sir Oli¬
ver Lodge’s bakers' comments on their bread. Others reported that irises
doubled the number of blossoms on a single stalk no matter whether
they were planted with or without fertilizer, and a plastic surgeon told
Cox that when he had put the magnetized ore among the roots of one
of two ponderosa pine seedlings in his lawn, the little tree had grown
in one summer four times as high as its neighbor.

Asked how the activator works Cox replied: “It is still a mystery.
No one knows how it functions any more than doctors know why aspirin
has its effect. Disappointing to nurserymen and city-dwelling plant lov-

j Force Fields, Humans and Plants 183

ers is the odd fact that the magnetized powder produces no results when
shaken into flower pots or greenhouse flats. To work it has to go into
the soil of the earth itself.” One explanation for this anomaly is that the
ferrous oxide—which when magnetized is called lodestone—radiates its
power only when in contact with what Gilbert, in his day, called its

animate mother.”

Whatever the ultimate solution to the problem, in the two decades
following World War I startling new discoveries were coming to light
in laboratories suggesting that mysterious radiations in the natural envi¬
ronment might be far more crucial to the well-being of plants and

animals than had hitherto been suspected.

In the early 1920s Georges Lakhovsky, a Russian-born engineer living

in Paris, had begun a series of books which suggested that the basis of
life was not matter but immaterial vibrations associated with it. “Every
living thing emits radiations,” stressed Lakhovsky, and advanced the
revolutionary new theory that cells, the essential organic units of all
living things, were electromagnetic radiators capable, like wireless sets,

of emitting and absorbing high-frequency waves.

The essence of Lakhovsky s theory was that cells are microscopic

oscillating circuits. In electrical parlance such an oscillating circuit re¬
quires two basic elements: a capacitor, or source of stored electric charge,
and a coil of wire. As the current from the capacitor flows back and forth
between one end of the wire and the other, it creates a magnetic field
which oscillates at a certain frequency, or so many times per second. If
such a circuit is greatly reduced in size, very high frequencies are ob¬
tained; Lakhovsky believed this to be what occurs in the microscopically
tiny nuclei of living cells. In the small twisted filaments within cellular
nuclei Lakhovsky descried the analogs to electrical circuits.

In his L’Origine de la Vie , published in 1925, Lakhovsky set forth
a number of startling experiments upholding the idea that disease is a
matter of disequilibrium in cellular oscillation, that the fight between
healthy cells and pathogens, such as bacteria or viruses, is a “war of
radiations.” If the radiations of the microbes are stronger, cells begin to
oscillate aperiodically and became “diseased.” When they cease to oscil¬
late, they die. If the cellular radiations gain ascendance, the microbes

184 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

1

are killed. In order that a diseased cell be restored to health, Lakhovsky
felt it should be treated by means of a radiation of appropriate fre¬
quency.

In 1923, Lakhovsky designed an electrical apparatus emitting very
short waves (with lengths of two to ten meters) which he called a
“radio-cellulo-oscillator.” In the surgical clinic of the famous Salpetriere
hospital in Paris he inoculated geraniums with cancer-producing bac¬
teria. When the plants had developed tumors the size of cherry stones,
one of them was exposed to radiation from the oscillator. During the first
days the tumor grew rapidly, but after two weeks it suddenly began to
shrink and die; after a second two-week period it fell off the afflicted
plant. Other geraniums treated over different time periods also shed
their cancers under the effect of oscillator radiations.

Lakhovsky saw these cures as supporting his theory. The cancer had
been overcome by the enhancement of the normal oscillations of healthy
cells in the geraniums. This was quite opposite to the approach of the
radium specialists, who proposed that the cancer cells be destroyed by
external radiation.

In the development of his theory Lakhovsky was faced with the
problem of the origin of the energy necessary for the normal production
and maintenance of cellular oscillations. It did not seem probable to
Lakhovsky that the energy is produced within cells any more than the
energy in an electric battery or a steam engine is internally produced.
He therefore came to the conclusion that the energy is externally derived
from cosmic radiation.

To try to establish the cosmic origin of the energy, Lakhovsky decided
to dispense with the device he had dreamed up to produce artificial rays
and tap natural energy from space. In January, 1925, he picked one of
a series of geraniums previously inoculated with cancer and surrounded
it with a circular copper spiral thirty centimeters in diameter, its two
unjoined ends fixed in an ebonite support. After several weeks he found
that whereas all the control geraniums inoculated with cancer had died
and dried up, the plant ringed with the copper spiral was not only
radiantly healthy but had grown twice as high as uninoculated controls.

These spectacular results led Lakhovsky into a complex theory as to

Force Fields , Humans and Plants 185

I

. li

I

r

i

; !| l

I ll

i

i

how the geranium had been able to pick up from the vast field of waves
in the external atmosphere the exact frequencies which enabled its ce
to oscillate normally and so powerfully that the cancer-afflic e ce

were destroyed. f

To the multitude of radiations of all frequencies emanating from

space and unceasingly traversing the atmosphere Lakhovsky gave the
generic name ‘'universion.” He concluded that some of them filtered
by the spiral, were brought specifically into action to restore the degene¬
rating cells of the diseased geranium to healthy activity.

The universion, or collectivity of universal radiation was not in
Lakhovsky’s mind, to be associated with the notion of a ^niplete
vacuum in space with which physicists had replaced the ether of the
nineteenth century. To Lakhovsky the ether was not the negation of a
matter but a synthesis of radiation forces, the universal plexus of aU
cosmic rays. It was a ubiquitous and all-pervading medium into winch
disintegrated elements were consigned and transforme m o e ec
particles. Lakhovsky believed that with the recognition of this new
concept the bounds of science could be extended and a basis Imdforan
attack on the most absorbing problems of life, including te epat y, e
transmission of thought, and, by inference, man’s communication with

h! March of 1927 Lakhovsky wrote a communication, “Influence of
Astral Waves on Oscillations of Living Cells,” which was presented to
the French Academy by his friend the eminent biophysicist and discov¬
erer of diathermy, Professor Jacques Arsene d’Arsonval.

By March of 1928, the geranium with the spiral around it had a -

tained the abnormal height of four and one-half feet and was flouns mg
even in winter. Sure that by his work on plants he had stumbled on a
new therapy of unimaginable importance to medicine, Lakhovsky went
on to develop a sophisticated therapeutic device for human beings which
he called a “multi-wave oscillator.” It was successfully used in French,
Swedish, and Italian clinics to cure cancerous growths and lesions
brought about by radium burns; goiters; and a variety of diseases re¬
garded as incurable. When Lakhovsky, fleeing the Germans who had
occupied Paris and were seeking him out as a prominent anti-Nazi, came

186 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

to New York in 1941, the physiotherapy department of a large New
York hospital employed his multi-wave oscillator successfully to treat
arthritis, chronic bronchitis, congenital hip dislocation, and other ills,
and a Brooklyn urologist and surgeon, though he would not reveal his
name, stated that he had used it on hundreds of patients to arrest bodily
disturbances unamenable to other treatment. When Lakhovsky died in
1943, his astonishing findings, which laid the basis for radiobiology, were
left unpursued by the medical profession, and today use of the multi¬
wave oscillator for medical treatment is officially banned by U.S. health
authorities.

While Lakhovsky was working in Paris, at the Texas State University
a team headed by Professor E. J. Lund devised a way to measure electri¬
cal potentials in plants. In a series of experiments lasting more than ten
years, Lund showed that plant cells produce electric fields, currents, or
impulses which, as Bose had implied, could serve as “nervous systems.’'
Lund further demonstrated that the growth of plants is triggered by
these electrical nervous systems rather than by growth hormones, or
auxins, as was previously believed, and that the auxins are summoned
and even transported by the cell-generated electric fields to the place
where growth is known to occur.

In an important but little-known book. Bioelectric Fields and Growth,
Lund put forward the revolutionary finding that the electric pattern in
plant cells changes nearly a half hour before the diffusion of hormones
in them can be effective and growth detected.

Meanwhile, the research of the Russian Alexander Gurwitsch, which
inspired L. George Lawrence to begin his study of the potentialities of
biocommunication, despite its rejection by the U.S, Academy of
Sciences, began to get a new lease on life. The distinguished bacteriolo¬
gist at Cornell University, Professor Otto Rahn, was amazed to find that
whenever any of his laboratory workers fell ill they appeared to cause the
death of yeast cells with which they were experimenting. A few minutes’
exposure to their fingertips even at a distance would kill vigorous cells
of this carbohydrate-fermenting fungus. Further investigation showed
that a chemical compound excreted from the hands and face of the sick
technicians was responsible; but exactly how it acted at a distance was

Force Fields, Humans and Plants 187

I

a mystery. Rahn went on to prove that the continually renewed tissue

of the cornea of the eye, as well as most wounds and an “ r ^ m "
radiation; he set these and other findings down in a book Inmibl
Radiation of Organisms, which, on the whole, was ignore y is co

'^Because most physicists still had no better means of detecting all this

new and strange radiation than they did Mesmer's “animal ™S net,sm
or Reichenbach’s “odic force,” the idea that living tissue couldiemitor
respond to vibrations of energy was greeted with skepticism. The qiK -
tioning light thrown on discoveries such as Lakhovsky s, Gurwitsch s,
and Rahn’s was also focused on those of a surgeon, George Washington
Crile, founder of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation who pubhshed
Phenomena of Life: A Radio-Electncal Interpretation in 1936. The
result of a lifetime of research, it offered evidence that the living org
nism is specifically adapted to the formation, storage,. and^ ° e “ ^

“' Tc umts or Laces in protoplasm which Crile called radiogcns^
Three years before his book appeared, Crile pointed out in an address
to the Congress of the American College of Surgeons that it would be

possible for future skilled radio-diagnosticians to detect ‘ e P™ s ™ ce
disease before it became outwardly apparent. For his efforts Cnle was
ridiculed by both his medical colleagues and by cellular biologists, who
accused him of having no solid grasp of the literature.

i I

The effects of electromagnetic energy on living cells, both healthy and

diseased, which most doctors and medical r^archers incMmg cancer

soecialists have yet honestly to confront, were finally to be revealed y
the magic of time-lapse photography. Because most plants
slowly they look as unchanging to the human eye as if petrified O y
by looking away from plants for several hours or, better, for several day
can one notice that they are different from the plastic flowers and sh ubs
which are supplanting living plants in florist shops across the wor
In 1927, an Illinois teen-ager, staring at the buds on a large apple tree

in his front yard, wondering when they would open into

that if he could take pictures of them in regular sequence he would be

able to watch the buds unfold before his eyes.

188

tuned to the music of the spheres

Thus began the career of John Nash Ott, whose pioneering interest
in time-lapse photography led him to unveil new mysteries in the king¬
dom of plants.

To experiment with exotic varieties of plants Ott built a small green¬
house, where he found that each variety of plant presented to him as
many problems as would a different tribe to an anthropologist. Many of
his charges seemed to act like temperamental prima donnas with deep
psychological disturbances. As he consulted with university botanists
and research scientists on the staffs of large companies, little by little the
basic biological causes for his plants’ misbehavior became clear: they
were extremely sensitive not only to light and temperature but to ultravi¬
olet, TV and X-rays.

Ott’s discoveries about light and temperature may lead to the explana¬
tion of many botanical mysteries, not the least of which is the tremen¬
dous size of plants growing high in the mountains of central Africa.

Over thirty years ago the English author Patrick Synge in his book
Plants with Personality suggested that though no one had been able to
produce a satisfactory theory on the origin of giantism in plants, it
perhaps might happen on account of a complement of peculiar environ¬
mental conditions, namely, a low but moderately constant temperature,
a consistently high humidity, and a strong intensity of ultraviolet light
due both to the altitude and to the equatorial location.

In the European Alps vegetation growing high up tends toward
dwarfism, but in the Mountains of the Moon, or Ruwenzori as the
Africans call them, Synge encountered heathers “as mighty as great
trees” and found shell-pink impatiens with flowers two inches across.

On the extinct volcano Mount Elgon, rising fourteen thousand feet
on the Kenya-Uganda border, Synge found lobelias, which in England
are tiny blue-flowered plants, growing nearly thirty feet tall, “like gigan¬
tic blue and green obelisks.” He photographed them half covered with
snow and with icicles hanging from the tips of their leaves. But when
the same plants were brought back to England, they could not survive
outdoors even in the mild winters of Surrey.

Synge’s idea accorded with the hypothesis of the French chemist
Pierre Berthelot, that it is the continuous presence of electricity high in
the Alpine ranges that accounts for the luscious growth of plants in very

Force Fields , humans and Plants 189

poor soil If the conditions enumerated by Synge are someday simulated
by researchers, perhaps these giant plants will be successfully grown at

56 Ott’! experiments in time-lapse photography were to lead him to the
discovery that different wave lengths of light have a fundamental effect
on photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert light to
chemical energy and by means of it synthesize organic compounds from
inorganic ones, turning carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates,
with a release of oxygen. To attack this problem, he spent months
building equipment which would allow him to take microscopic pictures
of the streaming of protoplasm m the cells of Elodea grass w i e it was
stimulated by direct unfiltered natural sunlight. Exposed to the sun s
rays, the chlorophyll-containing bodies, called chloroplasts, which are
the principal agents of photosynthesis, streamed in an orderly fashion
around the edges of the obloid cells. But when the ultraviolet light in
the sunlight was filtered out, some of the chloroplasts would drop ou
of the streaming pattern and huddle, immobile, in the comers Cutting
out the colors from the blue end of the spectrum toward the red rncreas-

ingly slowed the chloroplast action. , n

Particularly fascinating to Ott was the fact that, at the day s end, all

the chloroplasts slowed down and stopped no matter how intensely they

were subjected to artificial light. Only when the sun rose the next day

would they resume the normal streaming pattern.

Ott realized that if the basic principles of photochemistry, as t ey
applied to plant photosynthesis, had analogs in the animal world then,
as the proponents of color-therapy have long maintained, vanous fre¬
quencies of light might affect the physical well-being of humans by
acting on the body chemistry in a way similar to the action of certain

drugs on nervous and mental disorders.

In 1964 an article in Time magazine spurred Ott to research the ettec

of TV radiation on plants and humans. The story suggested that symp¬
toms of nervousness, continuous fatigue, headaches, loss of sleep, and
vomiting in thirty children under study by two U.S. Air Force physicians
were somehow related to the fact that all of these children were watch¬
ing TV from three to six hours on weekdays and from twelve to twenty

190 tuned to the music of the spheres

hours on weekends. Though the doctors had concluded that the children
were afflicted by prolonged idleness in front of the set, Ott wondered
if some sort of radiation might not be at issue, particularly that of X-rays,
which lie beyond ultraviolet in the energy spectrum.

To test this idea, Ott covered half of the picture tube of a color TV
set with a sixteenth of an inch of lead shielding, normally used to block
out X-rays. The other half he covered with heavy black photographic
paper capable of stopping visible and ultraviolet light, but allowing other
electromagnetic frequencies to penetrate.

Ott placed six pots of bean sprouts in front of each half of the TV
tube, a pair at three different levels from top to bottom. As a control,
six more pots, each with its three bean sprouts, were placed outdoors,
fifty feet from the greenhouse where the TV set was located.

At the end of three weeks, both the lead-shielded beans and those
growing outdoors had risen to a height of six inches and appeared
healthy and normal. The beans shielded from the TV only by the
photographic paper had been distorted by toxic radiations into a vine-
type growth. In some cases the roots appeared to have grown incongru¬
ously upward out of the soil. If TV radiation could make monsters of
bean plants what might it do to children?

Several years later, when Ott was discussing the distortion of the
beans with space scientists, he was told that the root growth of his bean
plants exposed to radiation resembled that of wheat seedlings in a
bio-capsule in outer space, where it was thought to be due to the
weightless condition from lack of gravity, Some of the scientists seemed
intrigued by his idea that not weightlessness but a general background

radiation of an unspecified energy might cause the eccentric root
growth.

Since general background radiation coming from the zenith, or the
point directly overhead, penetrates through less of the earth’s atmos¬
phere and is therefore more powerful than that coming in at any other
angle, Ott thinks that roots of plants grow downward to get away from
the radiation directly above them.

Similar experiments showed that white rats exposed to the same
radiation which caused the wild growth in the beans became increas-

Force Fields, Humans and Plants 191

ingly hyperactive and aggressive, then progressively lethargic“ a P°

Where it was necessary to pnsh then, to makc thcm move in the. ag -

Ott noticed further that after he set up his TV in the 8 een J u ’
rats in an animal-breeding room fifteen feet away produced litters of only
one or two babies, as against a norm of eight to twelve, even though two
building partitions intervened between the TV set and epregn
mothers. When the TV set was removed, it took six months

Weeding to return to normsi- i 1

Because of increasing difficulty in maintaining discipline m schoo ,

children who are hyperactive or have difficulty concentrating have ove
recent years been administered so-called behaviora modification drugs
or “peace pills ” This practice has aroused a storm of controversy among

it has not been publicly suggested, Ott wonders whether this hyperac
tivity-and increasingly reported forms of lethargy 1 “' ud,n ^ 1 ° n g d

offld to repeat his experiments cost-free for technicians at RCA s
Bio-Analytical Laboratory, the director of research not only hastily d
dined bit was later quoted as saying, “It is utterly impossible for any

TV set today to give off harmful rays. . is

Ott knew however, that since the radiation from
contained in an extremely narrow band on the electromagnetic spec¬
trum biological systems sensitive to this narrow spike o energy cou
be as overstimulated by it as they would be by light focused throug
magnifying glass. The only difference is that, whereas the ™agn,

the TV can travel in any direction where it meets no obstruction. If
one-half of a mill.-roentgen doesn't appear to be a

° LlTof a thousandth of a ton. And it is easy to juggle the deama
point in infinitesimal amounts without realizing the true relationship

involved. Eighty degrees Fahrenheit is a comfortable ^

but one has only to double this figure to reach a point where most forms

of life on earth could no longer exist.

Ott’s belief that electromagnetic radiation affects p an s an
in many unsuspected ways increased when he was called by Paramou

192 tuned to the music of the spheres

Pictures in Hollywood to make time-lapse photos of flowers for a new
picture, starring Barbra Streisand, based on the Broadway musical hit
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. In the story the heroine numbers
among her extrasensory abilities that of making flowers grow as she sings
to them. The studio wanted Ott to begin work immediately on gerani¬
ums, roses, irises, hyacinths, tulips, and daffodils for inclusion in this part
of the film.

To duplicate as nearly as possible natural rays of outdoor sunlight, Ott
had developed a new full-spectrum fluorescent tube, with added ultravio¬
let. Because he had a tight deadline, he knew that only if the flowers
would grow under the new lights could he hope for success. To his relief,
all the flowers grew well. But Ott noticed that the best results came
when the flowers were placed under the center, rather than the ends,
of the fluorescent tubes, He knew that the tubes worked on the same
principle as the cathode guns in TV sets or in X-ray machines, but at
much lower voltages, so low in fact that textbooks stated they could not
produce harmful radiation. Suspecting the textbooks might be wrong,
Ott placed two sets of ten parallel tubes end to end so that there were
twenty cathodes in close proximity. When he sprouted the same kind
of potted beans used in the TV experiments, he was startled to see that
the ones close to the cathodes were stunted whereas those both at the
center of the tubes and ten feet away from them appeared normal.

After many more experiments with beans, Qtt became certain that
they are far more sensitive to trace amounts of radiation than the
standard radiation-measuring equipment presently available. This, he
thinks, is because whereas the instruments pick up only a single reading
of energy the biological systems are exposed to its cumulative effects.

Ott was next confronted with the possibility that light frequencies
could affect the development and growth of cancer.

His initial clue that there was a connection between light frequencies
and cancer came when a physician in charge of cancer research at one
of New York's largest hospitals agreed to ask fifteen human cancer
patients to spend as much time as possible outdoors in natural sunlight
without their glasses and avoid artificial light sources, including televi¬
sion.

By the end of the summer the doctor told Ott that it was the consen-

Force Fields, Humans and Plants 193

SUS of all those assisting in the project that fourth of he pahents had
shown no further advancement in tumor development.

In the meantime, Ott had aroused the interest of
ophthalmologist, who explained to him that a layer of ^1'" the retina
of the eve with no function in vision, showed abnormal response

j „ an( J as ked if he would run toxicity tests of the drugs

by utilizing microscopic time-lapse photography. Ot used a pto
contrast microscope equipped with a complete set of coin ed filta,
which permit the outline and details of cell structure jcM «

nique revealed that exposure to the wavelengths of blue W "
abnormal pseudopodical activity in the pigment of the retinal ceBs
whereas red light caused the cell walls to rupture. Even more mtcrest.g
™sT fact that when the cells were fed, by adding fresh media to the
slide chambers, cell division was not encouraged at constant tempera
ture, but if the temperature was lowered during the feeding accelerate

division would take place within sixteen hours.

During their work the researchers also noticed that )ust before sunse

the activity of the pigment granules within the cells wo^low down
and would return to normal only the next mormng. It seemed to Ott

that they were behaving just like the chloroplasts in

grass. Perhaps plants and animals had more similarities in their bas

functioning than had hitherto been suspected.

Ott suggests that the responses of chloroplasts and the pigment gran¬
ules in retinal epithelial cells may be “tuned- to the
tram of sunlight, under which all life on this earth has evolved. It would
thus appear,” he says, “that the basic principles of photayrrthesrs m
plants, where light energy is recognized as a pnnc.pal growthjcgulating

“wtii-regulating factor in animal life through control of the chemical

01 Other studies J cellular behavior have led Ott to conclude that
malillumination or malradiation may be as important as malnutrition

the initiation of disease. _ . ,

At the 1970 meeting of the American Association for the van

194 tuned to the music of THE SPHERES

ment of Science, Dr. Lewis W. Mayron, in his discussion of Ott’s
research with bean plants and rats exposed to TV radiation, concluded
that “the radiation has a physiological effect both on plants and animals
which appears to be chemically mediated.” Mayron also commented on
Ott’s experiments with the effects of fluorescent tubes on beans, stating:
“The implications for human health are enormous when one considers
the magnitude of the use of fluorescent lighting in stores, offices, facto¬
ries, schools and homes.”

With generous support from the Evelyn Wood Foundation, Ott has
carried on studies on what effects TV sets might have on children with
behavioral problems. With the cooperation of Mrs. Arnold C. Tackett,
principal of a school which devotes itself to such children in Sarasota,
Florida, Ott made checks of home TV sets watched by the youngsters
and found measurable amounts of X-ray radiation in most of them,
especially those which had run for long hours without overhaul. The
parents agreed to get the children to spend much more time playing
outdoors during the summer vacation and to sit far back from the TV
while watching it.

By November of the new school year, Mrs. Tackett was able to report
that the behavioral problems of children so treated were markedly di¬
minished.

By the late 1960s the U.S. Congress had passed a Radiation Control
Act by a vote of 381 to 0. Florida Representative Paul Ropes, co-author
of the act, credited Ott with “getting us all started on the road toward
control of radiation from electronic products.” Ott credits his plants
with showing him the way to the light.

Since the work of Gurwitsch, Rahn, Crile, and the proponents of
electroculture all supported the earlier contentions of Galvani and Mes-
mer that living things have electrical or magnetic properties, it was
strange that no one had suggested that they must also have about them
the same electromagnetic fields as those accepted in the world of particle
physics, This was exactly the theory boldly advanced by two Yale Uni¬
versity professors, one a philosopher, F. S. C. Northrop, the other, like
Galvani, a medical doctor and anatomist, Harold Saxton Burr.

By asserting that electrical fields are the very organizers of life systems.

Force Fields , Humans and Plants 195

Northrop and Burr offered chemists a new basis on which to exp '^ h °*

the thousands of separate constituents they had uncovered might be put

body replaced every six months, are properly aligned. Thlsapp “'“
revitalize the rejected theories of Mesmers animal magnetism and Gah

vani’s animal electricity and provide a ^f^V^enriBeSn and
for the airy “elan vital" of the French philosopher Henri Bergson,

the “entelechy” of the German biochemist Hans Dnesch.

To prove their theory, Burr and his laboratory coUeagues

a voltmeter of a new design, which drew no current from life forms t

be studied and thus could not disrupt the total fields around thenr

Twenty years of research with this device and its more sophisticated

descendants revealed to Burr and several of his assoaates astonis ^

things about the vegetal and animal world. Dr. Louis g *

2Z „d -s»” •

for example that the precise moment of a woman o ^ ^

measured with great accuracy and that some women Th ghthe

™& like t0 leam beMer h ° W ’

or how not, to have children. detected in cer-

Burr himself determined that malignances could be detects! in c

tain organs before any clinical signs could be observed, and that the rate
of healing in wounds could be reliably measured. The future location
a chick’s head could be found and pinpointed in the egg rom w
would letch, without breaking it, during the first day

Turning to the world of plants, Burr measured what he came
“life-fields” around seeds, and found that profoun c anges in
voltage patterns were caused by the alteration of a sing e gene
parent stock. Even more potentially interesting to plant b-d- wa h
discovery that it is possible to predict how strong and healthy a future
plant will be from the electrical diagnosis of the seed w ic pro u

it.

196 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

I-

Because, of all living things, they seemed the most enduring and the
least motile. Burr charted the life fields of trees on the Yale campus and
at his laboratory in Old Lyme, Connecticut, over nearly two decades.
He found that recordings related not only to the lunar cycle and to
sunspots, which flare up at intervals with many years between them, but
revealed cycles recurring every three and six months that were beyond
his explanation. His conclusions seemed to make less suspect the long-
mocked practices of generations of gardeners who claimed that their
crops should be planted according to the phases of the moon.

One of Burr's students, Leonard J. Ravitz, Jr., who was to become a
psychiatrist, was able to measure depths of hypnosis with the Burr-
discovered techniques as far back as 1948. He went on to the not
surprising conclusion that all humans are in hypnotic states most of the
time, even when wide awake.

The continuous charting of life fields in people indicates a cyclic rise
and fall of voltage, the peaks and valleys of which correlate to the periods
when they feel good or bad, “up” or “down.” By plotting the curves in
advance it is possible to predict highs and lows weeks in advance, as the
students of bio-rhythms have proposed, going back to the time when
they were first theorized by Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, whose letters were so
encouraging to Sigmund Freud during the years of Freud's self-analysis.

Burr’s life work, as further developed by Ravitz, indicates that the
organizing field around the “bodies” of living things anticipates the
physical events within them and suggests that the mind itself, as Marcel
Vogel maintains, can, by modulating the field, affect positively or
deleteriously the matter with which it is held to be associated. But these
signposts had yet to be read by the leaders of organized medicine, and
Burr’s work has only recently begun to be seriously considered.

Medical pundits are now in for a further shock due to a startling
discovery in 1972 at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medi¬
cine in Novosibirsk, a burgeoning industrial city of over a million people
on the banks of Siberia’s mighty river Ob, which strongly supports the
findings of Gurwitsch, Rahn and Crile.

S. P. Shchurin and two colleagues from the Institute of Automation
and Electrometry have been awarded a special diploma by the USSR

Force Fields, Humans and Plants 197

State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries for discovering that
cells can “converse” by coding their messages in the form of a special

electromagnetic ray.

The experimenters placed identical tissue cultures in two hermetically
sealed vessels separated by a wall of glass, then introduced a lethal virus
in one of the chambers which killed the colony of cells inside it. The
second colony remained wholly unaffected. However, when they re¬
placed the glass divider with a sheet of quartz glass and again introduced
killing viruses to one of the colonies, the Soviet scientists were aston¬
ished to see that the second colony also met the same fate as the first,
even though the viruses could not possibly have penetrated the barrier.
Other first and second colonies of cells, separated by the quartz glass,
both perished when only the first colony was murdered with chemical
poisons or lethal radiation and the second left unexposed. What killed
the second colony in each case?

Since ordinary glass does not permit ultraviolet rays to pass but quartz
glass does, it seemed to the Soviet scientists that here was a key to the
mystery. They recalled that Gurwitsch had theorized that onion cells
could emit ultraviolet rays, and they resurrected his ideas from the limbo
to which they had been consigned in the 1930s. Working with an
electronic eye amplified by a photomultiplier and registered by a self-
recorder which traced a graph marking the energy levels on a moving
tape, they found that when life processes in the tissue cultures remained
normal , the ultraviolet glow, invisible to the human eye but detectable
as oscillations on the tape, remained stable. As soon as the affected
colony began to battle against its infection, the radiation intensified.

Reports on this work in Moscow newspapers disclosed that, however
fantastic it might seem, the ultraviolet radiation from the afflicted cells
carried information encoded in the fluctuation in intensity which was
somehow received by the second colony, just as words are transmitted

and received in dots and dashes in the Morse code.

Since the second colony seemed in each case to die in exactly the same
way as the first, the Soviets realized that it was as dangerous for healthy
cells to be exposed to the transmitted signal of dying cells as it was for
them to be exposed to viruses, poisons, and lethal radiation. It appeared

198 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

that the second colony upon receiving the alarm signal from the dying
first colony began to mobilize for resistance and that its very “restructur¬
ing for war” against a nonexistent enemy proved as fatal as if it had
indeed been attacked.

Moscow newspapers suggested that the Novosibirsk work may help to
pinpoint what inner reserves the human body possesses to resist disease
and quoted Shchurin on how it may help to open new horizons in
diagnosis: “We are convinced that the radiation is capable of giving the
first warning about the beginning of malignant regeneration and of
revealing the presence of particular viruses. At the present time the early
identification of many ailments, for instance the numerous forms of
hepatitis, presents major difficulties.”

Thus, fifty years after his work, his countrymen have finally brought
recognition to Gurwitsch’s brilliant research. Coincidentally they have
also validated the work of another obscure compatriot, Semyon Kirlian,
who has managed to capture on film extraordinary pictures of the force

fields around humans and plants so accurately described and measured
by Burr and Ravitz.

Force Fields, Humans and Plants 199

CHAPTER 13

The Mystery

of Plant and Human Auras

The long train was on the last leg of its journey from Moscow to
Krasnodar, a south Russian inland port on the Kuban River two un-
dred miles northwest of the volcanic Elbrus, Europe s highest mounta

peak in the Greater Caucasus range. . . , .

In one of its “soft” cushioned cars reserved for Soviet officials a p an

specialist, bored with watching the flat countryside, shl only partly-
recovered in 1950 from the Nazi ravages of the Great Patriotic ,
reopened his satchel to check the condition of two similar teaves J h ‘
he had plucked in a greenhouse before leaving the Soviet capital. Re¬
lieved to see that the leaves were still sparkling fresh and green in their

bedding of moist cotton wool, he sat back in his fauteuil to admire the
approach of the Caucasian piedmont.

Late that evening in a small Krasnodar apartment, a corner of which'
was fitted out as a miniature laboratory, Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, an
electrician and amateur photographer, and his wife, Valentina, were
making some adjustments to equipment they had begun building two
years before the Nazi attack on their country.

With their new invention they had discovered they could photo¬
graphically reproduce—without lens or camera—a strange luminescence
which seemed to issue from all living things but was unapprehensible by
the human eye.

A knock on the door surprised them, as no visitor was likely to call
at that time of evening- they were even more surprised when a total
stranger announced he had come all the way from Moscow to see if they
could make for him photographs of the strange energy which he had
heard they alone could make visible on film. From his brief case the
stranger pulled the two identical leaves and handed them to the Kirlians.

Excited at the prospect that their discovery was to be put to an official
test, the Kirlians stayed up till after midnight, but were disappointed to
note that while they could make excellent pictures of energy flares from
one of the leaves, they could get only a weak facsimile from the other.
They worked on through the night, trying to get photos of the lumines¬
cence as similar as the leaves themselves, but were wholly unsuccessful.

In the morning, crestfallen, they showed their results to the scientist,
who shouted in amazement: “But you've found it! You’ve proven it
photographically!" He explained that one leaf had been plucked from
a healthy plant, the other from a diseased specimen. Although the two
leaves appeared identical to the human eye, the pictures plainly differen¬
tiated between them. Illness was evidently manifest in a plant’s energy
field before becoming visible as a symptom in its physical body.

That plants, as well as animals and human beings, have fields of fine
sheaths of subatomic or protoplasmic energy which permeate the solid
physical bodies of molecules and atoms was a centuries-old allegation by
seers and philosophers. This extra dimension or “aura" depicted in
ancient iconography around the bodies of saints, with golden halos

The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras 201

around the heads, has been referred to by persons gifted with extrasen¬
sory perception since the beginnings of recorded history. By laying film
or plate in contact with an object to be photographed and passing
through the object an electric current from a high-frequency spark
generator which put out 75,000 to 200,000 electrical pulses per second,
the Kirlians had come across a way of photographing this “aura”—or
something akin to it.

Leaves from plants, sandwiched with film between the electrodes of
their device, revealed a phantasmagoria hitherto restricted to clairvoy¬
ants, a micro-universe of tiny starry points of light. White, blue, and
even red and yellow flares were pictured surging out of what seemed to
be channels in the leaves. These emanations, or force fields round a ieaf,
became distorted if the leaf was mutilated, gradually diminishing and
disappearing as the leaf was allowed to die. The Kirlians were next able
to magnify this luminescence by adapting their photographic processes
to optical instruments and microscopes. Rays of energy and whirling
fireballs of light appeared to shoot out of plants into space.

The Kirlians also examined all kinds of “inanimate substances, in¬
cluding metal coins. Each had a different luminating pattern. Most
interesting was the fact that while a two-kopeck coin showed only a
constant glow around its edges, human fingertips seemed to shoot forth
flaming energy in bursts like miniature volcanoes.

After their photographic demonstration of pathology in the leaf from
the sick plant for the Muscovite visitor, it was another ten years before
the Kirlians began to emerge from obscurity in the USSR.

In the early 1960s Dr. Lev Fedorov of the USSR’s Ministry of Public
Health, struck by the possibilities of the new photography for medical
diagnosis, awarded the Kirlians a first research grant but when Fedorov
died soon thereafter, official funding from Moscow began to dwindle

and academic skeptics were once more in control.

It was only when a journalist took up the Kirlians story that interest
was again aroused. “This situation,” wrote I. Belov, “is as bad as before
the revolution, when the evil hand of Tsarist bureaucrats determined
there was too much uncertainty in novelty. Twenty-five years have passed
since the Kirlians made their discovery, yet the Ministries in charge still
haven’t released the funds.”

202 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Belov s effort had its effects. In 1966, a conference bringing together
many scientists interested in ail aspects of what was coming to be called
“biological energy” was held in Alma Ata, capital of the Kazakh Repub¬
lic. In proceedings of the conference, entitled Problems in Bioenergetics,
a Moscow biophysicist, Viktor Adamenko, joined with the Kirlians to
author a seminal paper “On Research of Biological Objects in High-
Frequency Electrical Fields.” The paper stressed the enormous difficul¬
ties of studying the spectrum of “electrobioluminescence” but added
that when these are overcome, “we will be able to obtain important
information about bioenergetic processes in a living organism.”

For all the mounting Soviet interest, it was another three to four years
before American science—which had branded as fake Wilhelm Reich’s
1939 discovery of a life energy in plants and humans which he called
orgone—paid attention to the new developments. What attracted this
attention was not the Soviet scientific publications but a book, Psychic
Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by two North American journalists,
Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, which appeared in the summer

of 1970.

Excited by what she had read in the Ostrander-Schroeder volume, a
former Broadway actress, now professor at the Neuropsychiatric Insti¬
tute of the University of California at Los Angeles, Thelma Moss,

Ph.D., wrote to Russia and received an invitation to visit Professor
Vladimir Inyushin at Alma Ata.

Working with several colleagues, Inyushin had written up his research
into the Kirlians work in 1968 in a book-long scientific paper: The
Biological Essence of the Kirlian Effect Though Kirlian himself had
maintained that the strange energy in his pictures was caused by “chang¬
ing the nonelectrical properties of bodies into electrical properties which
are transferred to film,” Inyushin and his collaborators went several steps
further. They declared that the bioluminescence visible in Kirlian pic¬
tures was caused not by the electrical state of the organism but by a
^biological plasma body” which seemed to be only a new word for the
etheric or astral body of the ancients.

In physics plasma is defined today as an electrically neutral, highly
ionized gas composed of ions, electrons, and neutral particles which has
been called the “Fourth State of Matter” (after solids, liquids, gases),

The Mystery of Plant anu Human Auras 203

As far back as 1944, as the Allied armies were storming Forbes
Europe,” a book by the Russian V. S. Grishchenko, The Fourth State
of Mutter, appeared in French in Paris. Credit for coining the term
bioplasma may thus belong to Grishchenko. The same year the discov¬
erer of “mitogenetic radiation,” A. G. Gurwitsch, published his book m
Moscow entitled The Theory of a Biological Field, summing up twenty

years of work. .

Inside the “bioplasmic” body, said Inyushin, processes have their own

labyrinthine motion, different from the energy pattern in the physical
body yet the bioplasmic body is not a chaotic, but a whole unified
organism which acts as a unit, is polarized, gives off its own electromag¬
netic fields, and is the basis for “biological” fields.

When Thelma Moss arrived on an evening flight in Alma Ata, she
was invited by Inyushin to visit his laboratory and lecture to his students.
Elated, she went to sleep sure that she would be the first American
scientist to visit a Soviet institution engaged in studying Kirlian photog¬
raphy The following morning when Inyushin came to pick her up at
her hotel, he regretfully told her that “permission for the visit had not

come from Moscow. ,

Moss was nevertheless able to leam from Inyushm that during six

years of research with Kirlian photography he had been able to note that

specific areas of the human body revealed characteristic colors which

might prove significant in medical diagnoses. The clearest photos, he

told Moss, were those taken at four o'clock in the afternoon the worst

at midnight. When Moss asked Inyushin point-blank if his bioplasms

body was what occult Western literature refers to as the “aura or the

“astral” body, he said: “Yes!” „ , .

In ancient philosophies and in Eastern and Theosophical teaching,

the energy body which duplicates the human body is also called the
etheric body, fluidic body, or prephysical body. It is believed to be the
unifying agent for the material body, a magnetic area where ^material
or subatomic vortices of the cosmos are transformed into the individual,
the channel through which life communicates with the physical body,
the medium for telepathic and clairvoyant projection. For decades scien¬
tists have been trying to find a way to make this body visible.

204 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

While Moss was in Alma Ata, the eminent American psychiatrist
Montague Ullman, director of the department of psychiatry at the
Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, was simultaneously
interviewing Viktor Adamenko in Moscow.

Ullman was informed, somewhat to his surprise, that Adamenko and
other Soviet scientists had been able to determine that the “bioplasma”
not only undergoes a drastic shift when placed in a magnetic field but
is concentrated at hundreds of points in the human body which seem
to correspond to the ancient Chinese system of acupuncture points.

Thousands of years ago the Chinese mapped seven hundred points on
the human skin as paths along which they believed a life force or vital
energy to circulate. The Chinese insert needles at these points to correct
imbalances in the energy flow, and to cure disease. Spots where the
Kirlian lights flared most brilliantly on a human body appeared to match
the acupuncture points mapped by the Chinese.

Adamenko is still unsure about Inyushin’s attribution of the
phenomena to a “bioplasma body,” because there is as yet no “rigorous
proof” of its existence, and therefore prefers to define the visible emana¬
tions as “a cold emission of electrons from the live object into the
atmosphere.”

In the United States this “cold emission of electrons” is almost
universally translated as a “corona discharge,” which is compared to the
static electricity emitted by a person after walking across a carpet and
touching a grounded metal. The name is derived from the faintly col¬
ored luminous ring which surrounds celestial bodies and is visible
through a haze or thin cloud or the luminous irregular envelope of highly
ionized gas outside the chromosphere of the sun. But giving it an
academic name has explained neither its substance nor its function,

As president of the American Society for Psychical Research, Ullman
found it extremely interesting that Dr. Anatoli Podshibyakin, a Kiev
electrophysiologist, had discovered that bioplasma, if that is what it is,
instantly reacts to changes on the surface of the sun even though cosmic
particles, ejected by the sun, take about two days to reach the earth.

Many parapsychologists view man as an enmeshed, integral part of life
on earth and in the universe. They maintain he is linked to the cosmos

The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras 205

via his bioplasm ic body, and reacts to changes in the planets aswellas
to the moods and illnesses of others, to thought, emotion, sound, light,
color, magnetic fields, the seasons, cycles of the moon, tides, thunder¬
storms, strong winds and even levels of noise. If there is a change in the
universe and environment, say the parapsychologists, a resonance is
produced in the vital energy of the human body which in turn affec s
the physical body. It is through his bioplasmic body that parapsycholo¬
gists believe a man can be in direct contact with a living plant.

Still another U S. parapsychological researcher, Dr. Stanley Krippner,
director of the extraordinary Dream Laboratory at the Maimomdes
Medical Center in New York—where pictures have been successfully
directed at sleepers in order to produce in their minds destred dreams
trekked to Russia in the summer of 1971. While in Moscow, Krippner
was the first American invited to give an address on parapsychology
to the Institute of Psychology in the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.
The lecture was attended by some two hundred psychiatrists,
physicists, engineers, space scientists, and cosmonauts in training.

Krippner found out that Genady Sergeyev, a neurophysiologist working
at the Ukhtomskii Military Institute in Leningrad, had made Kirlran
photographs of Nina Kulagina, a sensitive who can, by simply passing
her hand over but not touching them, move paper clips, matches,

cigarettes, and other objects on a table top.

Sergeyev's photographs revealed that while Kulagina performs these

psychokinetic feats, the “bioplasmic field” around her body expands and
pulses rhythmically and a-ray of luminescence seems to shoot out of her

eyes.

In the fall of 1971 .WilliamA.Tiller, chief of the Materials Science
Department at Stanford University (Palo Alto, California) and one of
the world's experts on crystals, was the first American physicist invite
by Edward Naumov, chief coordinator for Technical Parapsychology in

Moscow, to investigate Kirlian photography in the USSR.

Although, like Moss and Ullman, Tiller was not permitted to visit
Soviet laboratories, he was able to spend several days with Adamenko.
When he returned to the United States, Tiller recommended in a highly
technical report that the Kirlian method and devices, among others,

206 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

were “so important to parapsychological and medical investigations that
attention should be focused on immediate construction of such devices
and the duplication of the Soviet results."

Tiller, who like Adamenko does not see the need for postulating any
new “bioplasma," and substitutes for it the “cold emission of electrons,"
has been building extremely sophisticated equipment for taking Kirlian
photographs in his Palo Alto laboratory.

One of the first actually to make Kirlian-type pictures in the United
States was Thelma Moss, who worked on the project with one of her
students, Kendall Johnson. With their apparatus, Moss and Johnson
were the first Americans to take color photos of leaves and pick up
almost every region of the visible spectrum. American coins, appropri¬
ately enough, come out in red-white-and-blue, as do photos of the energy
from the fingertips of the human hand.

Henry C. Monteith, an electrical engineer in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, working at home, put together an apparatus consisting of two
6-volt batteries, a vibrator used to power automobile radios, and an
ignition coil sold at all auto-supply stores. Like the Russians, Monteith
found that a live leaf gave beautiful and varied self-emissions that cannot
be adequately explained by conventional theory. He was further mys¬
tified when he discovered that a dead leaf gave, at most, only a uniform
glow. Exposed to only 30,000 volts, the dead leaf did not reveal anything
at all on film, even when bathed in water, but the live leaf shimmered
in a radiance of self-emissions.

As the potential implications of a photographic process in existence
for more than thirty years—which seemingly gave substance to the
notion of the existence of an aura, a subject considered by most Western
scientists to be on the “lunatic fringe" of investigatory effort—began to
be realized in the United States, demand mounted for more hard infor¬
mation. Stanley Krippner enlisted the cooperation of several financial
backers and organized the First Western Conference on Kirlian Photog-
raphy and the Human Aura in the spring of 1972 at Manhattan's United
Engineering Center, where a crowd of doctors, psychiatrists, psycho¬
analysts, psychologists, parapsychologists, biologists, engineers and pho¬
tographers packed the ground-floor auditorium to overflowing. At the

The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras 207

conference startling pictures by Moss and Johnson were shown of a leaf
before and after being pricked. Done with Kirlian techniques, the photo
of the wounded leaf revealed an enormous blood-red pond of energy in
its center which took the place of the bright azure and pinkish hue

which showed up before the pricking. _

The mystery of the link between human emotional or psychic states

and emanations radiating from the fingertips is deepened by Moss s
further finding that pictures of both her own and Kendall Johnson s

fingers differ from day to day and hour to hour.

Since the photos of leaves change with variations in parameters, Moss

conjectures that “at whatever frequency we take a picture, we are reso¬
nating or vibrating at the same frequency, with one particular aspect of
the material; thus, not a whole picture, but different pieces of informa-

tion are picked up.”

Tiller speculated that the radiation or energy coming out ot a leaf or
a human fingertip actually might be coming from whatever is present
prior to the formation of solid matter. This, says Tiller, “may be another
level of substance, producing a hologram, a coherent energy pattern ot
a leaf which is a force-field for organizing matter to building itself into

this kind of physical network.”

Tiller thinks that even if part of the network were cut away, t e
forming hologram would still be there. Apparently this is just what the
Russians have been able to prove with a plant leaf. A picture pnnte in
the Journal of Paraphysics (published in Downton, Wiltshire, England)
shows a Russian Kirlian photograph of a leaf with one part cut away. Yet
where nothing would show ordinarily, the outline of the missing part ot

the leaf remains. ,

That this was not just Russian subterfuge was strikingly continued

when Douglas Dean made photos of the fingertip of a New Jersey hea er,

Ethel de Loach, whose files bulge with successful case histories One

picture, taken while the healer was at rest, showed only a dark blue

radiation streaming out of the skin and revealing the tip of the long nail.

A second picture, shot when she was asked to heal, revealed in addition

to the blue radiation an enormous orange and red flare leaping out o

a point below the actual fingerprint. Both pictures were subsequently

208 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

published on the cover of the medical journal Osteopathic Physician.
Kirlian photos of faith healers reveal a smaller glow after healing, while
those healed have greater emanations, indicating some sort of energy
flow from the hands of the healer into the body of the patient, giving
substance to Galvani’s and Mesmer's theory of “animal magnetism.”

At the Human Dimensions Institute at Rosary Hill College in
Buffalo, New York, one of the professors. Sister M, Justa Smith, a
Catholic nun and biochemist, began thinking that healing energy com-
mg from or through a healer s hands would have to affect the enzyme
system before diseased cells could change to a state of health. Sister Justa
—who had finished a doctoral dissertation proving that magnetic fields
increase, while ultraviolet light decreases, enzyme activity—after engag¬
ing the cooperation of a healer, found that when he was in an “optimum
psychological state,” or good mood, the energy coming from his hands
could activate the pancreatic enzyme trypsin in a way which compared
to the effects of a magnetic field measuring from 8,000 to 13,000 gauss.
(Human beings normally live in a magnetic field of 0.5 gauss.) Sister
Justa is continuing experimentation to find out whether a healer can
activate other enzymes in the body and whether this activation can be
of help to the maintenance of health.

How magnetic fields affect life and how they might be related to the

energy of the aura ’ is a mystery only beginning to be unveiled. In

recent years scientists have found, for instance, that snails perceive

extremely weak magnetic fields and, since they can also distinguish their

direction, could be said to incorporate structures which behave like
navigational compasses.

Jan Merta, whose own projections of what he terms “auric energy”
have not only turned dowsing devices held in a doctor’s hands against
the doctor’s will and efforts to prevent it, but also so disturbed the
magnetic components of the video tape recording the procedure that
the film blacked out while supposedly recording a crucial sequence, has
developed a whole theory about auras, part of which suggests that
magnetic fields might significantly affect a learning process. Merta took
thirty mice and housed them in small cages made of transparent plastic,
len of them were exposed to the south pole, ten to the north pole, with

The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras 209

field strength of 5-10 gauss of a bar magnet. The third ten were left
untreated. With an ingenious learning device Merta was able to estab¬
lish that those mice which had lived under the influence of a magnetic
field were not only more active than the nonmagnetized mice, but

somehow were able to learn quicker.

It would seem that some correlation exists between the activity of the
“bioplasmic” or “auric” fields—if that is what they are—around living
things and their subjection to various types of radiation. Certainly there
is no doubt, in light of the pioneering Soviet work and its American
confirmation, that the health, physical or emotional, of plants and ani¬
mals can be objectified with the Kirlian technique.

The main strength of the Russian research, according to Professor
Tiller, is that “it has been able to provide us with detectors and devices
with which we can begin to show cause-effect relationships between
psycho-energetic phenomena and the kind of read-outs which our col¬
leagues find acceptable and that our logical system has come to accept
as proof. We're at that stage of naivete that we need this proof.”

The first Kirlian conference was so successful that a second meeting
was held in New York's Town Hall in February 1973. One of the most
striking presentations was that of Dr. John Pierrakos, a Greek-born
psychiatrist who showed detailed drawings of auras which he can visually
perceive around plants, animals and human beings and which he is able
to monitor in continual movement around neurotically and psychotically
disturbed patients. In her book Breakthrough to Creativity, published in
1967, Shafica Karagulla, M.D., reported how many physicians use their
observations of the human energy field in their diagnostic work. Because
they were guarded about discussing their unusual abilities outside their
own circle, Karagulla did not refer to any of them by name. Pierrakos
is perhaps the first physician publicly to state that his perceptions of the

human aura assist him in his diagnoses.

“Man is an eternal pendulum of movement and vibration, Pierrakos

told the Town Hall audience. “His spirit is captured in a body in which
forces throb and pulsate like the beat of a heart. Often, they thunder
and quake in his body with strong emotions that shake the very founda¬
tions of his physical being. Life goes on, rhythmically and quietly pulsat¬
ing with the warm feeling of love or cascading with avalanches of violent

210 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

emotion, for movement and pulsation- is life. When movement dimi¬
nishes, the person becomes ill, and when the movement stops, the
person is dying.”

Pierrakos likened human bodies to time capsules in which biological
functions are performed “for a century or so” after which the capsule
changes the shape of its existence. “During this time, like the flower that
brings the blossom and the seed that brings the flower and the fruit,
man s time capsule has to become aware of what is going on within and
without. To do so, asserted Pierrakos, we must describe and under¬
stand, fuse and integrate two attributes: life energy and consciousness

the former seen as the aura around the body with gradations similar
to that of the atmosphere which thins as it proceeds outward from the
earth. Though to his Hellenic ancestors energy was “something produc¬
ing movement, Pierrakos holds that this nebulous definition should be
made more precise. Energy is a living force emanated by conscious¬
ness, he suggests. By observing the energetic field emanating from the
body not unlike the steam over boiling water which, correctly ob¬
served, gives an idea of the water's nature—I get an idea of what is
happening in the body/' Pierrakos said.

In his pictures, Pierrakos illustrated the three layers he sees around

most of his patients. The first, a dark band no more than one-sixteenth

to one-eighth of an inch thick, lies close to the skin and looks like a

transparent crystalline structure. The second, a broader dark blue layer,

reminiscent of a cluster of iron filings, forms an ovoid envelope around

the body when seen from the front. The third is a lightish blue haze of

radiant energy which, when the patient is in good health, extends several

feet away from the body and accounts for why we describe happy zestful
persons as “radiant”

Pierrakos also showed how in patients with disturbances there are
interruptions in these layers and changes in their colors of which he can
see only the grosser aspects. When a psychotic patient told Pierrakos
that she was “secure” because another person stood next to her con¬
stantly “on guard,” he asked her to let him see this other person. All at
once he noticed a mass of light blue-gray energy in the shape of a human
o°dy next to his patient.

The energy field of plants can also be severely affected by disturbed

The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras 211

patients, says Pierrakos. “In some experiments with plants conducted in
my office with Dr. Wesley Thomas, we found that a chrysanthemum s
field contracts markedly when a person shouts at it from a distance of
five feet and loses its blue-azure color, while its pulsat.ond.min.shes to
one third. In repeated trials, keeping live plants more than two hours
daily near the heads of screaming patients (a distance of three
away), the lower leaves started falling down and the plant withered

within three days and died ”

Pierrakos related that the number of pulsations the energy field emits
per minute is also an indication of the internal state of a human being_
The pulsations are much slower in older persons than in children, and

in sleep than in wakefulness. , , , i

Since the direction of the flow of energy on the front of the body

Starts in the midriff and proceeds downward in a sort of curving L toward

one of the legs and upward in an inverted L to the opposite shoulder,

then reverses this flow on the back side of the body, the whole energy

pattern around the body forms a figure 8. Put together in symbolic form

the two pairs of L shapes, front and back, have from time immemona

been represented in cultures throughout the world as the swastika, a

Sanskrit word for * well-being. , D .

The same kind of energy field observable in humans is seen by i -

rakos macrocosmically over the ocean with miles-high fountains of radia¬
tion bursting forth from narrower bands of pulsation below. Since the
amount of activity in this earthly aura plotted by Pierrakos against the
time of day reveals the lowest ebb just after midnight and theTnghes
shortly following noon, this directly correlates with Rudolph Steiner s
account of how the chemical ether is exhaled and inhaled by our planet.

A research team of physicists and electronics specialists is currently
seeking to objectify Pierrakos’ “sensitive” sight. Under the auspices of
the Center for Bio-Energetic Analysis they are developing a means of
detecting the radiations of the human animal and plant auras with a
sensitive photomultiplier tube, an instrument which measures photons
or light energy from the "etheric” field around a body. In a preliminary
report they stated in Town Hall that, to date, their work indicates
strongly that human beings radiate a strange field, detectable by the
tube, the properties of which remain to be analyzed and explained.

212 TUNED TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Pierrakos, who can also see the energy pumping forth from plants and
trees, warns of the danger of comparing the phenomena revealed by
Kirlian photography to known radiations such as X-rays. “The study of
the aura could become completely mechanized and objectified without
reference to the great phenomena of life within the entity/' he says.

In this observation Pierrakos is not far from the philosopher-math¬
ematician Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter, who
stresses that in back of the whole hierarchy of active energies, known
or unknown, may lie intent. “Content requires substance,” says Young,
“whether by reference to actual physical objects or to human feelings
or emotion. Substance is indeed what the work connotes, that which
stands under —sub stance —the interactions of the physical world. To
the physicist this is energy. To the human being it is motivation. ”

Through motivation or intent, or some other agency of will, is it
possible for living forms to effect changes in their own physical systems?
Is it possible for plants and men—which materialists assert are only
renderable at death into so much compost, soap, or chemicals—to grow
the way they want?

In the Soviet Union, a country which was originally founded on the
most materialist of philosophies, the developments resulting from Kir¬
lian photography have raised certain profound questions about the true
nature of life—vegetal, animal and human—about mind and body,
about form and substance. Thelma Moss believes that research in the
field has actually become of such great scientific importance to both the
Russian and U.S. governments that they are keeping their official efforts
strictly secret. Nevertheless, a spirit of friendly rivalry and of cooperation

has arisen between groups, thus far small, of Russian and American
scientists.

As Semyon Kirlian put it in a letter to the First Western Conference
to take up the implications of his work, “the new research will have such
enormous significance that an impartial assessment of the methods will
be carried out only by minds in succeeding generations. The possibilities
are immense; indeed, they are practically inexhaustible.”

The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras 213

PART IV

CHAPTER 14

Soil: The Staff of Life

Despite Carver s prescient observations on how to bring life back to the
cotton-debased soils of Alabama by rotating crops and fertilizing the soil
with natural humus, the farmers of that state—and those in every other
state of the Union—have since Carver's death been lured by the promise
of large profits to deal with the land, not in a natural, but in an artificial
way in order to force from it every ounce of productivity. Instead of
exerting patient and tender efforts to keep their soils in natural balance
they have been seeking to subjugate nature rather than cooperate with
ber. Everywhere there are indications that in the process of being raped
rather than loved, nature is protesting. If the process goes on, the victim

may die of bitterness and indignation, and with her all that she nurtures.

An example—one among thousands—is Decatur, Illinois, a farming
community in the heart of the United States cornbelt. As the summer
of 1966 was drawing to a close, steamingly hot and sultry, the corn stood
in the fields as high as an elephant’s eye, promising a bumper crop in
every direction, perhaps eighty to a hundred bushels to the acre. In the
twenty years since World War II the farmers had almost doubled the
land’s yield in corn by the use of nitrate fertilizers, unaware of the deadly

danger they were courting.

The following spring one of Decatur’s seventy-eight thousand towns-
men —whose living depended indirectly on the success of the corn
harvest—noticed that a cup of drinking water from his kitchen faucet
tasted funny.. As the water was supplied directly from Lake Decatur, an
impoundment of the Sangamon River, he took a sample to the Decatur
Health Department for testing. Dr. Leo Michl, a Decatur health official,
was alarmed to find that concentrations of nitrate in the waters of Lake
Decatur and the Sangamon River itself were not only excessive but

potentially lethal.

Nitrate, in itself innocuous to the human physical constitution, can
become deadly when converted by intestinal bacteria; these combine
nitrate with the blood’s hemoglobin into methemoglobin, which pre¬
vents the natural transport of oxygen in the bloodstream. This can cause
a disease known as methemoglobinemia, which kills by asphyxiation;
infants are particularly susceptible to it. Many cases of the mysterious

epidemics of “crib death” are now attributed to it

When a Decatur newspaper ran a feature suggesting that the city s
water supply had become polluted with excessive nitrate and that fertil¬
izers being poured on the surrounding cornfields might be the source of
the trouble, the story exploded like a bombshell in the cornbelt com¬
munities. At the time of the water analysis, farmers were resorting
almost exclusively to nitrogen fertilizer as the cheapest, and indeed the
only, means to produce over eighty bushels of corn to the acre, an
amount dictated by the economics of com production as necessary to
realize a profit. Com, or maize as it is known in the English-speaking
world outside North America, is a heavy consumer of nitrogen, which,

218 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

under natural conditions, is stored in the soil as a part of its humus, a
brown-black material composed almost wholly of decayed vegetable
matter.

For countless ages before man began to till the soil, humus was
accumulated by return to the soil of vegetation which died and rotted.
When man began to harvest crops he saw to it that humus, rich in
nitrogen and other elements upon which plants depend, was replaced
in the form of animal wastes and straw, the components of barnyard
manure. In many countries of the Far East, man’s own excrement,
euphemistically termed “night soil” by Westerners, is applied to the

land instead of being allowed to float away through sewage systems into
rivers.

An almost inexhaustible supply of such a natural manure is still avail¬
able to Decatur in nearby Sioux City, Iowa, America's heartland city on
the Missouri River, where millions of animals have been fed and slaugh¬
tered and from which they have been shipped to the nation's retail
markets for over half a century, A pile of steer manure has accumulated
longer than a football field. This mountain of organic waste, which poses
a headsplitting disposal problem to the city fathers, could easily be
processed into natural soil-enlivening products were anyone interested
in saving the soil. Nor is the Sioux City manure pile an exception. Dr.
T. C. Byerly, leader of the USDA’s waste-disposal programs, states that
wastes from livestock operations in the United States are presently equal

to those produced by the entire U.S. population and that by 1980 they
will double in size.

Instead of returning this natural humus-nitrogen to the soil, the
farmers chose to apply artificial nitrogen fertilizers. In Illinois alone the
consumption rose from ten thousand tons in 1945 to well over half a
million tons in 1966, and is rising constantly. Since the amount of
nitrogen applied is more than the com can naturally take up, the excess
washes out of the soil into the local rivers: in the case of Decatur, all
the way into the drinking cups of citizens.

foe Nichols, a physician and surgeon who founded the Natural Food
Associates in Atlanta, Texas, reported that a survey on farms throughout
the Middle West disclosed that the corn growth was so heavily fertilized

Soil: The Staff of Life 219

with synthetic nitrogen that it was unable to convert carotene into
vitamin A and that the cattle feed produced from it was also deficient
in vitamins D and E. Not only were the cattle not gaining weight but
they were not even reproducing as well as they should have, and, as a
result, the fanners were losing money. When certain strains of corn were
cut for silage, the nitrate content was so high the silos blew up and the
juice that ran out killed every cow, duck, and chicken unfortunate
enough to drink it. Even when silos did not explode, the nitrogen-laden
com in them became lethal, in the form of nitrous oxide fumes sufficient

to kill a man unsuspectingly breathing it.

The swirl of controversy which broke upon the Illinois cornbelt when

the truth became public had already arisen in scientific circles when Dr

Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural

Systems at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, presented a

prophetic paper on the relation between nitrogen fertilizer and the

nitrate level in Midwestern rivers at

Association for the Advancement of Science. Two weeks later, a vice-
president of the National Plant Food Institute, a lobby whose goal is to
protect the interests of the $2-billion American fertilizer industry, sent
copies of Commoner's paper for rebuttal to soil experts at nine major
universities. Because they had spent most of their careers advising farm¬
ers that the best way to insure bountiful crops is to apply artificial
fertilizers to the land, many scientists in these centers of academic
learning were as irritated at Commoner's allegations as were the fertiliz¬
er-lobby officials and rushed to take up cudgels in the lobby's and their

own defense. v ,,

An exception was Washington University's Dr. Daniel H. Kohl an

expert in the process of photosynthesis, who concluded that the problem
was so serious the fate of the planet might be at stake. When he joined
Dr. Commoner to ascertain, by isotopic analysis, exactly what was hap¬
pening to the excess nitrogen fertilizer in Illinois soils, his efforts were
immediately and viciously attacked by his departmental colleagues on
the grounds that such work was not a proper part of the department s

goal of pure research.

Dr. Commoner in his book The Closing Circle challenged his aca-

220 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

demic colleagues by pointing out that the new technology allowing more
com to be produced on less acreage than before might be a success
economically but was ecologically a disaster. Commoner characterized
the nitrogen-fertilizer industry in its hurtling dash for profits as one of
the “cleverest business operations of all time.” Evidence suggests that
in the presence of artificial nitrogen, the natural fixation of nitrogen
from the air by soil bacteria stops and, as a result, it is increasingly
difficult for farmers to give up the use of the artificial product. Like
addictive drugs, fertilizer nitrogen creates its own demand, the buyers
having been “hooked” on the product.

Dr. William Albrecht, a professor of soil science at the University of
Missouri, who, more than a quarter of a century ago was almost single-
handedly struggling to stress the importance of healthy soil to crops,
animals, and men, states that, with respect to analyzing fodder, cows are
more intelligent than people. Regardless of how tall and green forage
look to the eye when grown with an excess of artificial nitrogen, says
Albrecht, the cow will refuse it and will eat the surrounding grass shorter
and shorter. Though the cow cannot classify forage crops by variety

name, or by tonnage yield per acre, she is more expert than any biochem¬
ist at assessing their nutritional value.”

Albrecht's years of research were admired by the director of studies
of France's National Veterinary School at Alfort, near Paris, Dr. Andre
Voisin. In 1959 Dr. Voisin produced a book, Soil , Grass and Cancer ,
which was translated into English by the secretary of the Irish Agricul¬
tural Organization Society and published by New York’s Philosophical
Library. The thrust of Voisin’s important work is that man, in his effort
to produce food for an exploding world population, has forgotten that
his body comes from soil or, as the Bible put it, “dust and ashes.”

Voisin s realization that plants and animals are intimately associated
with the soil where they are born was strengthened when he visited the
Ukraine and saw that, within a few generations, the giant dappled
Percheron draft horses, developed on the soils of a French district south
o Normandy, had dwindled to the size of Cossack horses, though their
bloodlines had been kept pure by the Soviets and their conformation

mained the same, though miniaturized. This should remind us, says

Soil: The Staff of Life 221

Voisin, that all living things are biochemical photographs of their envi¬
ronment. Our ancestors, he says, were well aware of the fact that the
dust of the soil itself is what finally determines vigor and health
Developing his theme that the soil makes the plant, the animal, and
man, Voisin exposed his readers to a fascinating panoply of data which
illustrates that animals and plants on the land, not chemists in laborato¬
ries, are the supreme judges of agronomic methods. Voisin also provided
copious examples to prove that, by itself, chemical analysis of foodstuffs,
plants, and soil is wholly insufficient to the evaluation of their essence.
Voisin points out that chemists work mainly on “analytical groups,
which can be said to be “mere creations of their minds.” Noting that
farmers have long been given advice on the nutrition of their animals
on the basis of certain tests for nitrogen content, Voisin quotes the 1952
Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, R. L. M. Synge, who stated that it was
wholly presumptuous in this way to conclude anything about the rea

nutritive qualities of grass, or human food.

The dean of agriculture at the University of Durham in England was

so impressed with Voisin s lecture to the British Society of Animal

Production in 1957 that he summed it up for the assembled audience,

saying: “As Monsieur Voisin has forcibly explained to us, a herbage

which appears ideal to the chemist as judged by his analysis is not

necessarily ideal for the cow.

While Voisin was in England, he visited one farm on which the
incidence of a disease known as grass tetany afflicting a 150-head herd
of cattle was particularly high. Voisin learned from the farm owner that
his livestock had been foraging, not on seasoned pastureland, but on new
sowings of young grass to which enormous applications of industrial
fertilizer, particularly potash, had been applied. Voisin told the farmer
that when potash is applied to grass and other forage plants, the plants
gorge themselves immediately and indulge in “luxury consumption.’
This results in an enormous increase of the potash content of the plants
in a very short time and diminishes the quantity of other elements
absorbed, such as magnesium, the lack of which leads directly to tetany.

When a local veterinary arrived at the farm to care for some of the
stricken animals, Voisin asked him whether he knew to what extent his

222 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

client had employed potash to fertilize his grazing land. The animal
doctor, who had no idea that he was talking to one of the most distin¬
guished French representatives of veterinary science, curtly replied:
“This question concerns the farmer. My role is to care for sick animals
and to cure them.” Voisin was aghast at this stock reply. “I think,” he
wrote, “that it is not merely a question of healing the animal or man
stricken by disease, it is necessary to heal the soil so as not to have to
heal the animal or man.”

To Voisin it appears that the rise of the artificial fertilizer industry
has caused man mechanically and unthinkingly to rely to such an extent
on its products that he has forgotten his intimate relationship with the
soil as nature made it, that his adulteration of the dust from which he
springs may be sealing his destiny on planet earth. Though this predica¬
ment is hardly a century old, its progression has been geometric in the
proliferation of degenerative diseases in both animal and man conse¬
quent on the overuse of artificial fertilizers.

It all started with Baron Justus von Liebig, a famous German chemist
who published an essay in 1840, interestingly entitled Chemistry in Its
Application to Agriculture and Physiology. In this essay he appeared to
indicate that everything required by living plants was to be found in the
mineral salts present in their ashes once the plants had been incinerated
to destroy all the organic matter they contained. Though this theory ran
directly counter to centuries of agricultural practice, and indeed to
common sense, the visual results of the application of artificial fertilizers
composed of nitrogen, phosphates, and potash, together with calcium
oxide, or lime, seemed to prove Liebig’s theory, and later resulted in the
skyrocketing climb of fertilizer production by the chemical industry, of
which the figures for Illinois are but one example among thousands.

Dr. Albrecht of the University of Missouri terms this sudden blind
dependence upon nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the main con¬
stituents of artificial fertilizers, or NPK—as they are known in chemistry

an “ash mentality,” since ashes suggest the idea of death rather than
life. Like a senile yet undeposable king, the ash theory still rules the
world’s agricultural realms, despite the attack on it by a far-seeing
minority of individuals, a group collectively called “organic agricultural-

Soil: The Staff of Life 223

I

ists,” who have seized upon Justus von Liebig as the progenitor of what

they see as a worldwide cataclysm.

Already at the turn of the century, as the fertilizer industry was

getting into stride, a British doctor and medical researcher, Robert
McCarrison, later knighted for his thirty years' service as head of the
Nutrition Research Agency for the Imperial Government of India, and
director of its Pasteur Institute at Coonoor, had come up with a contrary
conclusion after spending a period of time working among the peoples
of the remote Gilgit Agency, a rugged, mountainous area south of the
Wakhand Valley, which is Afghanistan’s “tail.”

McCarrison was struck by the fact that the Hunzas, an ancient people
claiming descent directly from the soldiers of Alexander the Great, not
only could walk 120 miles at a stretch in the roughest mountain country
in the world, or cut two holes in a winter lake and swim from one to
the other under the ice for the fun of it, but, with the exception of an
occasional eye inflammation due to badly ventilated fires in their huts,
were wholly free of disease and lived to a great age. McCarrison also
found the Hunzas' health to be matched by their superior intelligence,
wit, and urbanity; though they were numerically few and their neighbors
warlike, they were rarely attacked—because they always won.

As neighboring people living in the same climate and geographical
conditions were afflicted with many diseases which never appeared
among the Hunzas, McCarrison began a comparative study of the die¬
tary practices of Gilgit Agency peoples which he extended to various
races all over India. By feeding diverse Indian diets to rats foolish
enough to eat whatever humans will eat—McCarrison found that his
rats reflected the conditions of growth, physique, and health of the
people eating the same foods. The rats which ate the diets of the peoples
such as the Pathans and Sikhs increased their body weight much faster
and were much healthier than those ingesting the daily fare of peoples
like Kanarese and Bengalis. When offered the food of the Hunzas, which
was limited to grain, vegetables, and fruits, along with unpasteurized
goat milk and the butter made from it, the rodents appeared to McCarri¬
son the healthiest ever raised in his laboratory. They grew rapidly, were
apparently never ill, mated with enthusiasm, and had healthy offspring.

224 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

i

j

i

i

When they were killed and autopsied at twenty-seven months_the

equivalent of fifty-five years in humans—nothing whatsoever was wrong
with their organs. Most amazing to McCarrison was the fact that
throughout their lifetimes they were gentle, affectionate, and playful.

Contrasted to these Hunza rats” others contracted precisely the
diseases of the people whose diets they were being fed and even seemed
to adopt certain of their behavioral characteristics. Illnesses revealed at
autopsy filled a whole page. All parts of their bodies, from womb and
ovary to skin, hair, and blood, and respiratory, urinary, digestive, nervous
and cardiovascular systems, were afflicted. Moreover, many of them,

snarling and vicious, had to be kept apart if they were not to kill each
other.

In laboratory work based on the newly discovered accessory food
factors, named vitamins in 1921 by the Polish-bom American biochem¬
ist Casimir Funk, McCarrison was able to prove that pigeons given a diet
which in people produces goiter developed polyneuritis. What was sur¬
prising to McCarrison was that other healthy birds fed on normal diets
harbored the same microbes but did not get ill. McCarrison believed it

was the faulty diet which led to the microbic triumph, not the presence
of the microbes themselves.

During a lecture to the British College of Surgeons McCarrison
described how, in the course of more than two years, his rats fed on the
diets of the more vigorous and well-developed Indian races never fell ill.
But the British Medical Journal, in a leading article on McCarrison’s
address, concentrated only on the diseases which diet would help to
prevent and completely overlooked the astonishing fact that the radiant
health of a group of people could be transferred dietarily to a group of
rats, simply by diet. Doctors, used to textbook explanations that pneu¬
monia was due to exhaustion, chills, a blow on the chest, the pneumo¬
coccus microbe itself, weakness in old age, or other illnesses, were unim¬
pressed with McCarrison’s finding that, in every case, his Coonoor
laboratory rats had fallen ill with pneumonia because of faulty food. The
®me was true for diseases of the middle ear, peptic ulcers, and other

afflictions.

American medical circles were no more receptive to the basic truth

Soil: The Staff of Life 22$

which McCarrison was propounding than their British colleagues. Dur¬
ing a Mellon lecture delivered before the Society for Biological Research
at the University of Pittsburgh, where McCarrison spoke on “Faulty
Food in Relation to Gastro-Intestinal Disorders,” they listened impas¬
sively as he said of the Hunzas: “Indeed their buoyant abdominal health
has since my return to the West, provided a remarkable contrast with
the dyspeptic and colonic lamentations of our highly civilized communi¬
ties.” Then as now, the weight of McCarrison’s evidence that Hunzas
enjoy a remarkably disease-free and long life failed to mobilize any
medical-research expedition to Hunza land. His stunning data were

buried in the Indian Journal of Medical Research.

Only when a British doctor, G. T. Wrench, brought out a book. The
Wheel of Health , in 1938 was McCarrison’s evidence given broad
public exposure. In the introduction to his work Wrench asked thought-
provokingly why, as students, young doctor aspirants were always pre¬
sented with sick or convalescent people for their teaching and never with
the ultrahealthy. It was abhorrent to Wrench that medical schools—
presuming that knowledge about health in its fullness was picked up by
a baby at its birth—taught only disease. “Moreover,” wrote Wrench,
“the basis of our teaching upon disease is pathology, namely the appear¬
ance of that which is dead from disease.” Then, as today, it seems the
emphasis was on pathology , not natural health. Neither Wrench s admo
nition nor the startling evidence of McCarrison—who after retiring as
a major general became physician to King George V—seemed to have
any effect on the health authorities of the United States and other
countries. In 1949 Dr. Elmer Nelson, in charge of nutrition at the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration, was reported by the Washington Post
to have declared in court: “It is wholly unscientific to state that a
well-fed body is more able to resist disease than a less well-fed body. My
overall opinion is that there has not been enough experimentation to
prove that dietary deficiencies make one more susceptible to disease.

Some time before McCarrison arrived in the Gilgit Agency, Albert
Howard a young mycologist and agricultural lecturer to the Impena
Department of Agriculture at Barbados in the West Indies, concentrat¬
ing on fungus diseases of sugar cane, came to the conclusion that the

true cause for plant diseases would never be found by researchers seques¬
tered in small laboratories and greenhouses full of flowerpots. As he put
it: “In Barbados I was a laboratory hermit, a specialist of specialists,
intent on learning more and more about less and less.” Because another
part of his job was to tour the Windward and Leeward Islands and advise
people on how to grow cacao, arrowroot, peanuts, bananas, citrus fruits,
nutmegs, and a host of other plants, Howard found that he learned
much more from men in actual contact with the land and its abundance
than he ever had in his botany classes.

He began to detect a fundamental weakness in the organization of the
research into plant pathology. “I was an investigator of plant diseases,”
he wrote, “but I had myself no crops on which 1 could try out the
remedies I advocated. It was borne in on me that there was a wide chasm
between science in the laboratory and practice in the field.”

Howard's first big chance to combine theory and practice came in
1905, when he was appointed imperial botanist to the Government of
India. In the Bengali town of Pusa, site of the agricultural research
station about to be founded by Lord Curzon, then Viceroy to India,
Howard decided to see whether he could create, on a seventy-five-acre
holding, plants with such health that they would not require poison
sprays to resist disease. Howard took as his teachers, not learned plant
pathologists, but the natives of the region. He felt that, since the crops
grown by cultivators around Pusa were remarkably free of pests, he

would make an in-depth study of Indian agricultural practices. As he put
it, he “speedily found my reward.”

By following the practices of the Indians, who used no pesticides or
artificial fertilizers but returned to the land carefully accumulated ani¬
mal and vegetal wastes, Howard was so successful that by 1919 he had
learned “how to grow healthy crops, practically free from disease, with¬
out the slightest help from mycologists, entomologists, bacteriologists,
apicultural chemists, statisticians, clearing-houses of information, artifi¬
cial manures, spraying machines, insecticides, fungicides, germicides,

and all the other expensive paraphernalia of the modern experimental
station.”

Howard was further astonished that his herd of work oxen, the ordi-

226 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

Soil: The Staff of Life 227

nary power unit of Indian agriculture, when fed only the produce from
his fertile land, never came down with foot-and-mouth disease, rinder¬
pest, septicemia, and other cattle diseases, which frequently devastated
herds of the modem experimental stations. "None of my animals were
segregated,” he wrote; "none were inoculated; they frequently came into
contact with diseased stock. As my small farmyard at Pusa was only
separated by a low hedge from one of the large cattle-sheds on the Pusa
estate, in which outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease often occurred, 1
have several times seen my oxen rubbing noses with foot-and-mouth
cases. Nothing happened. The healthy, well-fed animals failed to react
to this disease exactly as suitable varieties of crops, when properly grown,
did to insect and fungous pests—no infection took place.

Howard recognized that the entire basis for eliminating disease in
plants and animals was the fertility of the soil and that the first prerequi¬
site for all subsequent work was the bringing of the whole Pusa experi¬
ment station to the highest state of fertility. To do this he determined
to copy the age-long practices of China and build a large-scale system

for utilizing farm wastes to turn them into humus.

Unfortunately, while the idea was taking shape in his mind, the Pusa

agricultural research organization had developed to the point where, as
Howard saw it,

A series of watertight compartments-plant breeding, mycology, en¬
tomology, bacteriology, agricultural chemistry and practical a^iculture-
had become firmly established. Vested intents were createdwhiclire
carded the organization as more important than its purpose. There was
no room in it for a comprehensive study of soil fertility and its many
implications by one member of the staff with complete freedom of actom
Mv proposals involved “overlapping,” a defect which was anathema bo*
to the official mind (which controlled finance) and to a research institute

subdivided as Pusa always had been.

Howard therefore laboriously collected funds to found a new center
the Institute of Plant Industry, at Indore, three hundred miles northeas
of Bombay, where he had complete freedom of action. Since the funda¬
mental prerequisite for growing cotton, the principal commercial crop
around Indore, was raising soil fertility, Howard was in his element. He

228 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

accordingly developed what came to be known as the “Indore process”
of humus production. Within a short time he found not only that the
yields of his cotton were three times those of the surrounding country¬
side but that the cotton was remarkably free of diseases. “These results,”
Howard later wrote, “were progressive confirmation of the principle I
was working out—the connection between land in good heart and dis¬
ease-free crops; they were proof that as soon as land drops below par,
disease may set in.” Howard was firmly convinced that the two most
important goals were to keep the texture of his soils right and not to
overwork his land beyond a volume of operations for which it had
sufficient natural reserves.

Based on his findings, Howard wrote a book, The Waste Products of
Agriculture: Their Utilization as Humus, which was greeted with favora¬
ble and even enthusiastic reviews around the world. But, when the book
was circulated to agricultural scientists working on cotton problems in
research stations all over the British Empire, the reception was hostile
and even obstructive. This was because Howard’s successful methodol¬
ogy challenged the ingrained beliefs that breeding methods alone could
improve cotton yields and the quality of plant fibers, and disease was to
be reduced by direct assault with pesticides.

Furthermore, the time factor was ridiculed. How could one possibly
waste several years bringing the land back into what Howard called
“good heart”? This would demand the abandonment of chemical fertil¬
izers and the time-consuming production of Indore compost, a mixture
of decaying animal and plant matter at a ratio of three to one. Howard
clearly saw the threat he posed to the established order: “The production
of compost on a large scale might prove to be revolutionary and a
positive danger to the structure and perhaps to the very existence of a
research organization based on the piecemeal application of the separate
sciences to a complex and many sided biological problem like the pro¬
duction of cotton.”

Research workers on many other crops throughout the Empire took
the same dour view as that of the cotton specialists and they were
strongly supported by the moguls of the burgeoning artificial fertilizer
and pesticide industries.

Soil: The Staff of Life 229

When Howard went home to England at the end of 1935, he was
invited by the students of the School of Agriculture at Cambridge
University to address them on “The Manufacture of Humus by t e
Indore Method.” Because he had distributed printed copies of his re¬
marks beforehand in order to insure that a lively discussion would follow
his lecture, practically the whole staff of the school was present when
he mounted the lecture platform. But since he had been so consistently
attacked by plant specialists in England, India, and other parts of the
world, it was no surprise to Howard that nearly all of the school's faculty
from chemists to plant breeders to pathologists heatedly oppose is
remarks. Only the student body seemed enthusiastic and, as Howard
recalled, vastly amused at finding their teachers on the defensive and
vainly endeavoring to bolster up the tottering pillars supporting their
temple. “Here again I was amazed by the limited knowledge and experi¬
ence of the world's agriculturists disclosed by this debate. I felt was
dealing with beginners and that some of the arguments put forward
could almost be described as the impertinences of ignorance. It was
obvious from this meeting that little or no support for organic farming
would be obtained from the agricultural colleges and research institutes

of Great Britain.

Howard was correct. When later he read to the British Farmers Club
a paper on “The Restoration and Maintenance of Fertility,” representa¬
tives of experimental stations and of the fertilizer industry in the audi¬
ence poured ridicule on his ideas. To their protestations Howard replied
that he would shortly have his answer “written onto the land itself
Two years later Sir Bernard Greenwell, who had meticulously followed
Howard’s directions on his two estates, gave an account to the club
which more than bore out Howard’s findings. But the scientists and the
fertilizer salesmen, knowing that success was the one unanswerable
argument in favor of organic farming, failed to attend the lecture^
Despite the truculence of these vested interests, Howard, like McCar-
rison was knighted by the British Crown for his achievements. Yet only
a few sensible individuals began to follow his lead. One of these was Lady
Eve Balfour, who since childhood had suffered bad bouts of rheumatism
and continual head colds each winter from November to April. Learning

230 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

of Howard s research just before World War II, she initiated an Indore-
type operation on her own farm at Haughley in Suffolk. Instead of
bakers loaves she ate bread made only from whole-grain flour ground
from her own compost-benefited wheat. During the winter following the
change in her overall diet, she was entirely free from colds for the first
time in her life and was no longer bothered with rheumatic pains in
prolonged periods of cold, damp weather.

During the war, Lady Eve s book The Living Soil appeared in heavily
rationed England. The result of long detective work in libraries and
interviews with health specialists who were convinced of the soundness
of Howard s and McCarrison s views, it amassed a compendium of
scattered data on the links between humus-grown plants and the health
of animals and humans fed upon them. Lady Eve compared man's
prideful “conquest of nature” with the conquest of Europe taking place
under the Nazis. “As Europe is in revolt against the tyrant,” she wrote,
“so is nature in revolt against the exploitation of man.”

Lady Eve soon discovered that her piglets, attacked at the age of one
month by a disease called white scour, which the textbooks explained
was due to iron deficiency, and for which accordingly they recom¬
mended doses of chickweed or other plants rich in that element, could
be cured equally effectively by being fed actual soil from fields rich in
humus to which no chemical fertilizers had been applied, whereas soil

from land exhausted from the application of fertilizers had no effect
upon the disease’s progress.

About the same time Friend Sykes, a British farmer and breeder of
thoroughbred horses, attracted by Howard's ideas, bought a 750-acre
derelict farm in Wiltshire at nearly one thousand feet altitude, overlook¬
ing the Salisbury Plain, on which the land had been completely farmed
out. Sykes's previous experience as an agricultural consultant had taught
him that specialized farms, on which only certain crops or one variety
of animals were raised, resulted in the inevitable weakening of stock and
Plants by disease. He came to see that outbreaks of disease could be
completely eradicated by an “enlightened practice of good husbandry,”
particularly the introduction of mixed agriculture.

A student of ecology long before the subject became a household

Soil- The Staff of Life 231

word and an opponent of DDT more than ten years before Rachel
Carson shocked the world with her Silent Spring, Sykes wrote in his
Food, Farming and the Future, published in 1951: "The first thing that
Nature does when she has been treated with poison is to battle against
it and try to breed a resistant strain of the form of life that is being
attacked. If the chemist persists in his poisonous methods, he often has
to invent more and stronger poisons to deal with the resistance that
Nature sets up against him. In this way, a vicious cycle is created. For,
as a result of the conflict, pests of a hardier nature and poisons still more
powerful are evolved; and who is to say that, in this protracted struggle,
man himself may not ultimately be involved and overwhelmed?”

Sykes’s experience with his crops, based on his intuition that the soil
had a latent fertility which could be brought out simply by being tended,
and without the application of any fertilizer whatsoever, was little short
of fantastic. Sykes had the soil on one twenty-six-acre field analyzed. The
laboratory report indicated severe deficiencies of lime, phosphate, and
potash and appended a recipe of artificial fertilizers to correct the condi-

tion.

Ignoring the report, Sykes simply plowed and harrowed his field and,
without adding any fertilizer, sowed oats. To the amazement of his
neighbors he got a crop yielding ninety-two bushels per acre, which was
followed by an equally successful crop of wheat. After tilling the soil
again throughout the summer, he again sent a sample of it to the
laboratory and found that only a deficiency of phosphorus remained, the
lime and potash having been completely restored. In spite of the unani¬
mous views of experts that cereal crops could not be successfully grown
without a heavy dressing of phosphates, Sykes merely subsoil plowed the
acreage and achieved a harvest of wheat larger than the first one. Subsoil
plowing digs deeper into the ground and aerates this otherwise packed
and useless earth. When Sykes ordered his subsoiler plow in Chantry,
the agent who took his order said: "What on earth do you want a tool
like that for in this God-forsaken country? My firm has been in business
over a hundred years and has never supplied such an implement before.
Sykes’s wheat crop, which had been undersown with rye grasses an
clover, produced two and a half tons of hay to the acre in one cut th£

232 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

following year. Sykes then replowed his land, planted it to oats, and was
rewarded with a crop yielding over one hundred bushels to the acre. A
third laboratory analysis of his soil showed no deficiencies whatsoever.

Sykes described this procedure in an essay, “Farming for Profit with
Organic Manures as the Sole Medium of Re-Fertilization,” in which he
concluded that he had made his livestock healthy, his plants disease free
without poison sprays, and had been able to plant the same varieties of
wheat, barley, and oats from their seeds six consecutive years in a row
although other farmers had had to make changes.

Having achieved among his other successes a reversal of the trend in
seed degeneration which has led to increasing dependence by farmers
on hybrid varieties that are of questionable nutritional value, Sykes
teamed with Lady Eve Balfour and others to form the Soil Association,
the principal object of which was to unite people, of whatever country,
working for a fuller understanding of the vital relationships among the
soil, plants, animals, and man. Its philosophy centered on the idea that,
when quality is sacrificed to quantity, total food supply diminishes.

The Soil Association began a research project on land donated in
Suffolk, the referees for which stated:

Humanity has been badly frightened by the invention of the atomic
bomb. Yet the slower but more widespread devastation wrought by ex¬
hausting the soil upon which we depend for subsistence, is ignored by the
majority of people, who think of calamity only in terms of disaster or war.
Wasteful exploitation of the soil’s fertility is due in part to the desire for
quick cash returns, but in a greater degree to ignorance. Many scientists
and agriculturalists now realize that their knowledge of the natural pro¬
cesses underlying soil fertility is incomplete. They recognize that these
processes are only partly explicable in terms of agricultural chemistry and
that the purely inorganic approach to the study of soil science is a line
of thought as dead as the mechanical determination of nineteenth-cen¬
tury physics. “Dead” is the appropriate word; for the missing factor is that
of life itself.

Shortly before the organization of the Soil Association in Britain,
J- I. Rodale, editor of a health magazine in Pennsylvania, also came
across the work of Sir Albert Howard. “To say I was stunned,” wrote
Rodale afterward, “would be a definite understatement. Surely the way

Soil: The Staff of Life 233

food is grown has something to do with its nutritional quality. Yet this
theory had not found its way into the articles of any of the health
magazines I was reading. To physicians and nutrition specialists carrots
were carrots were carrots/' In 1942 Rodale bought a farm of his own
in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and set about publishing Sir Albert Howard's
book, An Agricultural Testament He then launched a journal, Organic
Gardening and Farming, which today, after three decades of growth, has
some 850,000 subscribers. A companion magazine to enlighten the
public on the links between health and organically grown foods, called
Prevention , was started by Rodale in 1950 and now circulates to over
one million readers increasingly anxious about the quality of American

food.

For his efforts in fighting for integrity in foods Rodale was harassed
by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which sought to stop the sale
of his book The Health Finder because it was advertised as being able
to “help the average person to remain comparatively free of many
terrible diseases." Rodale fought the case in court in a battle which cost
him nearly a quarter of a million dollars. He won hands down but was
not able to sue the government to recoup his losses.

Rodale's campaign began to challenge the usual view of people living
in the cities and suburbs of the United States and this is the vast
majority—-that soil is a static, inert substance. He challenged the use of
the word dirt as a synonym in English for soil. The former is used to
mean something mean, contemptible, or vile, whereas soil is alive and

clean.

Below its surface the earth teems with organisms. Earthworms, called
Annelida after the Latin word for rings, because they are made of one
hundred to two hundred ringlike segments, each an independent niinia-
ture body, burrow in the ground to depths of more than the height of
a tall man, acting as nature's plow, eating the soil as they move, ejecting
it again as castings to produce rich topsoil. Called by Aristotle the
“intestines of the soil," they could also be considered its vascular system,
since, when they are lacking, soils get hard-packed as if their arteries had

hardened.

In 1881, a year before his death, Charles Darwin brought out a book,
The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, in

which he made the statement that, without worms, vegetation would
degenerate to the vanishing point. He estimated that in a single year
more than ten tons of dry earth per acre passed through the digestive
systems of earthworms and that in a field well populated with them one
inch of topsoil would be created every five years. Darwin's earthworm
book moldered on the shelf for fifty years before it was re-examined; even
then his ideas did not penetrate into the curricula of the agricultural
schools, and it is not realized that with heavy application of chemical
fertilizers and pesticides, a field can lose its entire earthworm population,

so important for keeping it in a state of health necessary to the produc¬
tion of nutritious crops.

The favorable action of earthworms is often mocked, though in an
experiment run about 1950 their ability to improve poor soil was defi¬
nitely demonstrated. Twenty barrels were filled with impoverished soil
and planted with grass. Half the barrels contained live, the other half
dead, worms so that all shared identical amounts of organic matter. Each
barrel was treated with an equal amount of organic fertilizer. The barrels
with the live worms produced four times as much grass.

Just after World War I, Dr. William Beebe, first to explore the ocean
in a bathysphere, decided after a bird-collecting expedition in Brazil that
he needed something to do on the sea journey back to New York: so he
decided to examine jungle soil. Working on shipboard with a magnifying
glass and an old bag of earth mold and decaying leaves, Beebe found
himself plunged into a strange world of miracles. By the time he reached
New York Harbor Beebe had discovered in his soil over five hundred

separate specimens of life; he believed that more than twice as many
remained to be identified.

If Beebe had resorted to the microscope, and thus come across bac¬
teria, he would have been helpless to count them. Sir E. John Russell,
m his book Soil Conditions and Plant Growth , says that in one tiny gram
of soil treated with farmyard manure there are some twenty-nine million
acteria; however, where chemical fertilizers were used, the number was
cut almost in half. In an acre of rich earth, bacteria are estimated to
weigh more than a quarter of a ton; as they die, their bodies become
converted to humus, enriching the soil in a natural way.

In addition to bacteria are myriads of other microscopic organisms:

Soil: The Staff of Life 235

234 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

actinomycctes, filamentous forms resembling both bacteria and fungi;
tiny algae, related to seaweeds; protozoa, animals made up o a 1 g
cell apiece; and the strange chlorophyll-less fungi themselves, ranging
from one-celled forms to branched bodies, including yeasts, molds, and

m Th^vegetative part of one kind of fungus associates with the roots
of many green plants in a way beneficial to both that is still mysterious^
Though it seems to have reaped the attention of many agncultural
scientists, these fungi, called “mycorrhizae," were discovered by _

M. C. Rayner in England to have their threads consumed by tree too
with which they were associated. Traveling m France, Sir Albert How¬
ard found that the roots of the healthiest vines for wine grapes were rich
in mycorrhizae. No artificial fertilizers had ever been used on the vines,

yet they were noted for the high quality of their wines.

Another great advantage of natural agriculture, well known to yester¬
day’s farmer, has been forgotten in the highly specialized mono-crop
agriculture of today: the advantage of symbiosis in plants. As the Russian
essayist Vladimir Soloukhin has pointed out in Grass, modem Soviet
agronomy has lost all feeling for the benefits of plant companionships^
Though the specialists mock the idea that cornflowers growing in a field
of waving rye have a salubrious effect on this cereal crop and consider
the blue-blossomed plants-known to Americans as bachelor s buttons
-as only noxious weeds, Soloukhin asks: “If the cornflower were an evil
weed, would not the farmers of the world have grown to hate it before

the appearance of the learned agronomists? ,

How many botanists, asks Soloukhin, realize that the first sheaf of rye
harvest was lovingly decorated with a cornflower wreath and placed in
front of an icon, or that cornflowers were held by country folk to supply
bees with abundant nectar for honey even in the driest weather. Sus¬
pecting that all this folk wisdom had a solid basis in fact, Soloukhin
checked in scientific literature and found evidence supporting the accu¬
racy of peasant intuition. He read that if a hundred wheat grams are
mixed with twenty seeds from the ox-eye daisy the sprouting wheat w,l
be overwhelmed, but that if only one daisy seed is added, the wheat wi,l
grow better than if no daisies come up in its field. The same is true for

rye and cornflowers.

236 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

Soloukhin's view on plant symbiosis supports that of an American
professor of botany and conservation. Dr. Joseph A. Cocannouer who,
while Sir Albert Howard was working in India, ran the Department of
Soils and Horticulture at the University of the Philippines for a decade
and set up an extensive research station in Cavite province. In his book
Weeds: Guardians of the Soil, published nearly a quarter of a century
ago, Cocannouer sets forth the thesis that, far from being harmful,
plants usually considered noxious and troublesome, such as ragweed,
pigweeds, purslane, and nettles, bring up minerals from the subsoil,
especially those which have been depleted from the topsoil, and are
excellent indicators of soil conditions. As companion crops they help
domesticated plants to get their roots down to food which would other¬
wise be beyond their reach.

Writing of the “law of togetherness of all things,” Cocannouer
warned that the whole of world agriculture was beginning to ignore it.

s

“In America,” he wrote, “in our frenzied efforts to take advantage of
high prices for agricultural products, we are mining our soils instead of
farming them.” The same was beginning to be true of Europe, he added,
where, since World War II, few farmers have been practicing the law
of return .

Farmers are becoming more and more mechanical-minded, says
Cocannouer, one of whose best friends told him: “You and your Nature
stuff! That’s all very well in theory . . . but starving people are looking
to America for food. We’ve got to feed ’em. We’ve got to mechanize
our agriculture and make our land produce to its limit!”

Today, Americans live in a country where food production is supposed
to be the world’s most efficient. Yet food prices have continued to rise.
The cliche holds that back in 1900 one U.S. farmer could feed only five
people besides himself and that today he can feed thirty. But Michigan
University food scientist Georg Borgstrom says these mathematics are
illusory. At the turn of the century farmers, in addition to working their
land and raising livestock, delivered their own milk, butchered their own
animals, churned fresh farm butter, salted meat, baked bread, and
farmed with draft animals for which they produced feed. Now these
draft requirements are fulfilled by expensive machinery using increas¬
ingly costly and depletable fossil fuels, and the husbandman’s arts have

Soil: The Staff of Life 237

been taken over by factories. In less than twenty-five years several million
poultry raisers, whose chickens roamed the land ingesting all sorts of
natural vegetable and mineral products as well as insects, have disap¬
peared, to be replaced by some six thousand semiautomated outlets
where broilers, packed wing to wing in cages, are fed diets full of artificial

supplements.

All these off-farm activities figure in the high cost and dubious quality
of food. In fact, if one divides the twenty-two million workers building
farm machinery and farm-to-market roads, delivering and processing
farm produce and engaged in other food-production tasks, it becomes
clear that it takes about the same number of people to feed Americans

today as it did in 1900.

Cocannouer nevertheless realized that the views of his nature-scoffing
friend were bound to prevail. He was in despair that no publicity had
been given Luther Burbank’s firm belief that all agricultural learning

should begin with a study of nature.

Now there are signs that the agricultural worm may at last be turning

and that university scientists are beginning to wake up to the views
propounded long ago by McCarrison, Howard, and Rodale. As if they
were discovering something new, Drs. Robert F. Reefer and Rabind^r
N. Singh, agricultural researchers at West Virginia University in Mor¬
gantown, issued a press release on March 4, 1973, to the effect that
“what man eats is determined partly by the fertilizer that farmers put
on their crops.” In their experiments the two professors say that they
have determined that the amounts of trace elements in sweet and fodder
corn, so important in the diets of animals and humans, are dropping
dramatically owing to the kinds and amounts of fertilizers grown in some

soils.

Their somewhat belated rediscovery of this basic truth has also rein¬
forced a survey conducted in eleven Midwestern states, where it was
found that the iron, copper, zinc, and manganese content in corn has
fallen off severely in the past four years The application of huge doses
of nitrogen fertilizer such as that which has alarmed the citizens of
Illinois, may, says Singh, “have far-reaching effects on the health of
animals and men.” He adds that work of another of his West Virginia

238 CHILDREN' OF THE SOIL

colleagues shows that fertilization of pastures with high rates of nitrogen

may produce changes in the milk of grazing animals, as revealed by
feeding it to rats.

In light of the findings of such pioneers as McCarrison, Howard,

Albrecht, Voisin, Sykes, and Lady Eve Balfour, the West Virginia

professors’ research comes very late in the day, and their caution seems

somewhat ludicrous in the face of mounting rates for degenerative
diseases in the United States.

It is a strange fact that U S. medical schools, concerned mainly with

the study of diseased tissues and bodily systems and organs rather than

with healthy people, do not even have a single fundamental course on
nutrition in their curricula.

Soil The Staff of Life 239

CHAPTER 15

In the early nineteenth century an American of English descent named
Nichols cleared hundreds of acres of rich virgin land in South Carolma
on which he grew crops of cotton, tobacco, and corn so abundant tha

with the revenue he built a big house and educate a ^ ^

once in his lifetime did he add anything to the soil. When rt became
depleted and his crops dwindled, he cleared more land and cont.nu
his exploitation. When there was no more land to be cleared t e ami y

“"own to manhood, looked at the poverty-stricken acre¬
age ttkHora^ Greeley’s advice and moved west to Tennessee, where

he cleared two thousand acres of virgin land; like his father he planted
cotton, corn, and tobacco. When his own son was grown to manhood,
the land was once more so depleted from having living things taken from
it and none returned that he moved on to Horse Creek in Marengo
County, Alabama, there to purchase another two thousand acres of
fertile soil and raise a family of twelve children on the proceeds; the town
became Nicholsville; Nichols became the owner of a sawmill, a general
store, and a gristmill. This man's son also grew up to see devastation
where his father had grown rich. He decided to move further west and
settled in Parkdale, Arkansas, where he bought one thousand acres of
good land on the bayou.

Four moves in four generations. Multiplied by thousands, this is the
story of how Americans raised food on a continent which was there for
the taking. The great-grandson of the original Nichols, together with
thousands of other farmers, inaugurated a new era. After World War I
he began by farming his new acreage, instead of just mining it, adopting
the new government-recommended artificial fertilizers. For a time his
cotton crops prospered, but soon he noticed that his pest population was
much worse than it had been. When the bottom fell out of the cotton
market his son Joe decided that medicine, not farming, was to be his
career.

At the age of thirty-seven Joe Nichols was a full-fledged physician and
surgeon in Atlanta, Texas, when he suffered a massive heart attack
which nearly killed him. He was so frightened that for weeks he gave
up his practice to consider his situation. All he had been taught in
medical school, plus the opinions of his colleagues, suggested his progno¬
sis was extremely doubtful. There was no answer for his affliction beyond
nitroglycerin pills, which alleviated his chest pains but caused equally
painful headaches. With nothing better to do than to leaf through the
ads of a farming magazine, Nichols casually came across the line “People
who eat natural food grown in fertile soil don’t get heart disease.”

“Pure quackery! Quackery of the worst sort,” said Nichols of the
magazine, which was Organic Gardening and Farming, edited by J. I.
Rodale. "He isn’t even a doctor!”

Nichols remembered that for lunch on the day of his massive heart

Chemicals, Plants and Man 241

attack he had consumed ham, barbecue meat, beans, white bread, and
pie, which he considered a healthy meal. As a doctor he had advised
hundreds of patients on diet. But a line in the magazine nagged him:

What was natural food? What was fertile soil?

At the local library the librarians were helpful in bringing Nichols
books on nutrition. He also scoured the medical literature, but could find

no answer to what constituted natural food.

“I had an A.B. and an M.D. degree,’” says Nichols, “was fairly intelli¬
gent, had read a lot, owned a farm, but I didn’t know what was natural
food. Like many another American who hadn’t really investigated the
subject, I thought natural food meant wheat germ and black molasses,
and that all natural-food addicts were faddists, quacks, and nuts. I
thought you made land fertile by dumping commercial fertilizer on it.

Now, more than thirty years later, Joe Nichols’ thousand-acre farm
near Atlanta, Texas, is one of the showplaces of the state, he has never
again been afflicted with a heart attack. He ascribes both successes to
the advice which he took from Sir Albert Howard s book Agricultural
Testament and Sir Robert McCarrison s Nutritional and Natural Health.
On his farm, not another ounce of chemical fertilizer went into the land,

nothing but natural compost.

Nichols realized that all his life he had been eating “junk food,” food
produced from poisoned land, food that had led straight to a massive
heart attack. A third book, Nutrition and the Soil by Sir Lionel J. Picton,
convinced him that the answer to metabolic disease, whether it was
heart trouble, cancer, or diabetes, was indeed natural, poison-free food
grown on fertile soil.

The food we eat is digested and absorbed from the intestine into the
bloodstream. Essential nutrients are carried to the individual cells all
over the body, where repair work is done by metabolism, the process by
which stable nonliving matter is built up into complex and unstable
living material, or protoplasm. The cell has an amazing capacity to repair
itself provided it gets proper ingredients through proper nutrition; other¬
wise it becomes stunted or goes out of control. The cell, or basic unit
of life where metabolism occurs, needs essential amino acids, natural
vitamins, organic minerals, essential fatty acids, unrefined carbohy-

242 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

drates, and several more as yet unknown, but presumably natural, fac¬
tors.

Organic minerals, like vitamins, are found in balanced proportions in
natural food. The vitamins themselves are not nutrients, but substances
without which the body cannot make use of nutrients. They are parts
of an extremely complex, intricately interrelated whole.

In balance means that all the nutrients used by the tissues must be
available to the cell simultaneously. Furthermore the vitamins essential
to proper nutrition and good health must be natural. There is a great
difference between natural and synthetic vitamins, not a chemical but
a biological difference. There is something missing in the artificial that
is of biological or life-enhancing value. Not yet widely accepted, this fact
has been unequivocally established by the work of Dr. Ehrenfried
Pfeiffer, a biochemist and follower of the great natural scientist and
clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner. Dr. Nichols thinks the Pfeiffer techniques
can reveal exactly why natural foods or those containing natural vitamins
and minerals and enzymes—another chemical compound, of vegetable
or animal origin, which causes chemical transformation—are superior to
those grown and preserved with chemicals.

When Pfeiffer came to the United States at the outbreak of World
War II, and settled at Three-Fold Farm in Spring Valley, New York,
he worked out Steiner's “Biodynamic” system for making composts and
for treating the land, and set up a laboratory to investigate living things
without breaking them into chemical constituents.

Before his arrival in the United States Pfeiffer had developed in his
native Switzerland a “sensitivity crystallization method” to test finer
dynamic forces and qualities in plants, animals, and humans than had
thus far been detectable in laboratories. Dr. Steiner, who had given a
series of esoteric lectures at the Silesian estate of Count Keyserling in
the 1920s for agronomists concerned about the falling productivity of
their crops, had asked Pfeiffer to find a reagent which would reveal what
Steiner called “etheric formative forces” in living matter. After months
of tests with Glauber's salt, or sodium sulfate, and many other chemicals,
eiffer discovered that if a solution of copper chloride to which extracts

iving matter had been added was allowed to evaporate slowly over

Chemicals, Plants and Man 243

fourteen to seventeen hours it would produce a crystallization pat ern
determined not only by the nature but by the quality of t e p an om
which the extract was taken According to Pfeiffer, the same forma m
forces inherent in the plant and acting to bring about its form and shape
would combine with living growth forces to form the pattern of crystal

Dr Erica Sabarth, current director of the Pfeiffer-establ.shed labora¬
tory in Spring Valley, showed the authors rows of beautiful crystalliza¬
tions, looking like exotic undersea corals. She pointed out how a strong
vigorous plant produces a beautiful, harmonious, ^d clearly’formed
crystal arrangement radiating through to the outer edge,
crystallization made from a weak or sick plant results in an une

picture showing thickening or incrustation.

Pfeiffer’s method, says Sabarth, can be applied to determine

inherent quality of all sorts of living organisms. When a forester sent

Pfeiffer two seeds taken from different pine trees, and asked if he cou

detect any difference in the trees themselves, Pfeiffer submitted e

seeds to his crystallization tests and found that, whereas one crysta

picture was an example of harmonious perfection, the other was dis-

totted and ugly. He wrote to the forester that one of the trees shou

be a fine specimen, the other must have a serious defect. By refom mail

the forester sent Pfeiffer enlarged photographs of two grown trees, t

it was useless

fninV rtf nne was

for lumber. . , , , .

At Spring Valley Pfeiffer developed an even simpler and less time

consuming method to demonstrate how life veritably pulsates om
living soils, plants, and foods, but not from inorganic minerals, chemr
cals, and synthetic vitamins, which are dead. Requiring none of the
complex equipment of the standard chemical laboratory, it us « circu
filter-paper discs fifteen centimeters in diameter, provided with a small
hole in the center for insertion of a wick. The discs are laid in open peto
dishes in which stand small crucibles containing a 0.05 silver-mtr
solution. This solution climbs up through the wick and spreads over the
discs until it has expanded about four centimeters from the center
From the brilliant-colored concentric patterns Pfeiffer has been ab

244 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

to disclose new secrets of life. Testing natural vitamin C taken from such
products as rose hips, he established that the pattern of vitality was far
stronger than from artificial vitamin C, or ascorbic acid. Rudolf
Hauschka, a follower of Rudolf Steiner, suggests that vitamins are not
chemical compounds that can be synthetically produced but “primary
cosmic formative forces."

Before his death, Pfeiffer pointed out in his own booklet Chromatog¬
raphy Applied to Quality Testing that Goethe had stated a truth more
than 150 years ago which is of the utmost importance with regard to
the recognition of natural biological quality: The whole is more than the
sum of its parts. “This means,” wrote Pfeiffer, “that a natural organism
or entity contains factors which cannot be recognised or demonstrated
if one takes the original organism apart and determines its component
parts by way of analysis. One can, for instance, take a seed, analyse it
for protein, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, moisture and vitamins, but all
this will not tell its genetic background or its biological value.”

In an article, Plant Relationships as Made Visible by Chromatogra¬
phy,” published in the winter, 1968, issue of Bio-Dynamics , a periodical
to further soil conservation and increase fertility in order to improve
nutrition and health, Sabarth stressed that the chromatographic tech¬
nique especially reveals the quality, even the living force of the orga¬
nism.” She added that she plans to explore the possibilities of the
method not only as it applies to seeds and fruits but with regard to the
roots of plants and all the other plant parts.

In modern processed foods the vitamins, trace elements, and enzymes
are arbitrarily removed, mostly so as to render the food more durable.

As Nichols puts it: “They remove the life, in effect, killing it, so that
it will not live and die later.”

The leading culprits in the way of poisonous foods picked by Nichols
are the bleached flour that goes into white bread, white sugar, refined
table salt, and hydrogenated fats. One of the most innocent-looking of
comestibles, the normal soda cracker eaten with soup, contains all of the

a ve-mentioned noxious elements. “It is junk,” says Nichols, “which
cads straight to heart disease.”

From long before the so-called dawn of history bread has been a basic

Chemicals , Plants and Man 24$

nutrient for man. In mythology, the origin of domesticated grains is
attributed to Attis or Osiris. In the ruins of Swiss lake dwellers remains
of bread have been found which was baked at least ten thousand years

ago.

A grain or berry of wheat consists basically of a hard nutty kernel
called the germ at one end, a nub of solid starchy endosperm on which
the kernel feeds when planted as a seed until its roots can grow, and
three layers of protective husk collectively called bran. Essential en¬
zymes, vitamins and minerals, including iron, cobalt, copper, man¬
ganese, and molybdenum are in the germ and husk. Other grains—
barley, oats, rye, corn—have analogous constructions, and bread can be
made from all of them. Wheat germ is one of a very few places in nature
in which the entire vitamin B complex is found, hence bread was called
“the staff of life. 1 ' Whole wheat also contains traces of barium, a short¬
age of which in the human body can lead to cardiac disease, and

vanadium, also essential to the health of the heart.

From time immemorial wheat berries have been ground between two
circular stones. Until the advent of steam power the mills were worked
by hand, the first steam mill being erected in London in 1784. In stone
mills, the entire grain was ground into flour. In that process some of the
husk was reduced to powder, which gives color to whole meal. In
Deuteronomy 32, verse 14, man is enjoined to eat the fat of the kidney
of wheat”—meaning the germ. The development of iron rollers, by a
Frenchman in the early nineteenth century, brought with it a separation
of wheat germ, bran, and endosperm. Iron rollers were first used in place
of stones in 1840 by the Hungarian Count Szechenyi in his mill in Pest.
In 1877 a satisfactory roller mill was imported from Vienna to England.
Soon they were employed in Canada. Governor Washburn of Min¬
nesota a miller, brought the Hungarian process to Minneapolis and
began to devitalize American flour. By 1880 their use was universal.

From a commercial point of view the roller mill had three advantages
over the old grinding stones. By separating the husk and germ from the
starchy flour, the miller had two products for sale instead of one. The
husk and germ were sold as “offal,” or animal fodder. Removal of the
germ made it possible to keep the flour in good condition for a much

246 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

longer time, which increased the miller’s profit. When the roller mill was
introduced it became possible to adulterate wheat with 6 percent of
added water. For this the germ had to be removed or the flour would
not keep. It could then be sold separately.

In so-called “enriched” white bread, with the vitamins and minerals
removed, nothing is left but raw starch, which has so little nutritive value
that most bacteria won’t eat it. into this insipid starch synthetic chemi¬
cals are arbitrarily injected, which form only part of the missing vitamin
B complex, and are not properly ingestible by human beings because
they are not in balance. For thirty years white flour was bleached with
nitrogen trichloride, in what is known as the “agene process.” This uses
a poison which affects the central nervous system. It gives puppies fits,
and may contribute to mental illness in humans. In 1949 millers volun¬
tarily changed to chlorine dioxide for bleaching. This, says Nichols, is
also a poison. Other chemicals used to “improve” flour include benzoyl
peroxide, potassium bromate, ammonium persulfate, and even alloxan.
Chlorine dioxide destroys the remaining vitamin E in flour, and causes
the starch to swell, which is a boon to the baker. Researchers in England
found that removal of the natural vitamin E from bread reduces the

intake of a workman from about a thousand units a day to between two
and three hundred.

To compound this trouble, just as white flour was being introduced
into England so was margarine, the invention of another Frenchman,
as a cheap substitute for butter, devoid of vitamins A and D. The general
health of the country deteriorated. Men from northern England and
southern Scotland, large and powerful during the Napoleonic Wars,
became short and frail and unfit for military service by the time of the
oer War. A commission set up to investigate the phenomenon con¬
cluded it was caused by men moving to the cities, where they lived not
on wholesome country bread but on white bread and white sugar. In
when the U.S. Public Health Service announced a definite connec-
^on tween overrefined flour and the diseases of beri-beri and pellagra

i ^ mm * de k cienc y diseases of which over 100,000 cases were reported
* n ississippi alone—the millers went into action, not to change the
°ur> but to get the Public Health Service to shut up. Within six months

Chemicals, Plants and Man 247

the Public Health Service abjectly issued a “correction” to its bulletin.
White bread, they said, was perfectly wholesome—if eaten in conjunc¬
tion with an otherwise adequate diet of fruit, vegetables, and dairy
products. As Gene Marine and Judith Allen were to remark in reporting
the story in their recent book Food Pollution: So is cardboard.

The next villains in this melodrama of life are white sugar and glucose,
the heavy syrup fruits are packed in and the sweetener for most soft
drinks. In the seventeenth century, European manufacturers developed
a process by which after eight weeks of hard labor sugar could be refined
to something approximating whiteness. This whiteness, at first so expen¬
sive, caused white sugar to be considered by the poor more worthy of
being consumed. White sugar, says Nichols, is one of the most danger¬
ous food items on the market. All the good part, the molasses, the
vitamins, and minerals, are removed. There is nothing left but carbohy¬
drates and calories—of which we have too many already. The refining
is now done for purely commercial reasons; the sugar keeps better.
White sugar can be stored in hundred-pound cloth sacks for years in

dirty warehouses and still be sold for a profit.

Most table syrup, says Nichols, is nothing but cornstarch treated with
sulfuric acid, then artificially colored and flavored. Unlike natural fruit
sugars, honey, molasses, or maple syrup, it goes straight into the blood¬
stream, causing instant hyperglycemia—or too much sugar in the blood.
This drowns the human cells in sugar. The pancreas, heeding the alarm,
puts out too much insulin and produces a state of hypoglycemia, or too
little sugar in the blood. This seesawing, says Nichols, is the cause of the
vicious but ubiquitous coffee break: when a man begins his day with
refined sugar in his coffee and glucose on his cereal or pancakes, he
shoots his blood full of sugar, which triggers a pancreas reaction. By ten
o’clock he has hypoglycemia; so he has sweetened coffee or a soft drink
or a candy bar. This fills his blood with instant sugar. Again the pancreas
reacts. By noon he is down again; and so on throughout the day. A side
effect of hypoglycemia is that it causes a lowering of resistance, makes
a person nervous and not mentally alert, an easier prey to viral and
bacterial diseases.

One of the less-suspected poisons on the dining-room table is coin

248 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

mon refined salt or sodium chloride. Not in small doses, but over a long
period, it can cause high blood pressure and heart disease. Sea salt
contains trace minerals in balance, but by the time the salt hits the
supermarket it has been refined to pure sodium chloride with all trace
minerals removed. Furthermore it is treated under high heat with
sodium silicate, a drying agent, which makes it free flowing in wet
weather. This, says Nichols, disturbs the delicate balance of sodium and
potassium in the cells of the heart. The delicacy of chemical combina¬
tions is such that if the two basic elements of table salt were to be taken
separately in the same amounts, they would kill immediately.

The next and even more vicious cause of heart disease, says Nichols,

is hydrogenated fats. These include most of the fats and oils commonly

found in shortening, in store-bought peanut butter, and in practically all

commercial bakery products, crackers, cookies, and breads. Much ice

cream is made from mellorine, a cheap hydrogenated oil. Hydrogenation

consists in using a heated nickel catalyst to force hydrogen into the gaps

between the carbon atoms of linoleic acid. This prevents the resulting

fatty oil from going rancid; but it also destroys essential fatty acids.

These, says Nichols, not being absorbable by the body cells, have to go

somewhere in the body, and end up lining the blood vessels, causing
heart disease.

DDT and other pesticides also go straight to the seed oil 0 f com or
cotton. There is no way to remove them, and they are cancer causing.
Though DDT has largely been banned, its successors Diaidrin, Aldrin,
and Heptaclore, are equally insidious. “Personally,” says Nichols, “I
wouldn t have corn oil in my kitchen.” He recommends any of the
cold-pressed oils, such as olive oil, or safflower oil, which yield a wonder¬
fully clear, almost transparent, oily fluid.

Nichols points out that whereas natural rice is one of the best foods
in the world, and is one of the richest sources of natural vitamin B
complex, white processed rice is nothing but raw starch, an item already
superfluous in the high-carbohydrate American diet. American mission¬
ary wives in the Philippines managed to kill off hundreds of prisoners
m the local jails by philanthropically substituting polished rice for natu¬
ral rice in the prison diets, causing beri-beri.

Chemicals, Plants and Man 249

The peanut butter which Carver went to such pams to produce is now
mostly being made from rancid peanuts, says Nichols, since the food
chemists have learned to clean it up, deodorize it and decolor it so that
it can be sold to unsuspecting mothers. By one means or another and
with hundreds of toxic additives to choose from, chemists can fix food
so that it is very difficult for the citizen to tell that the food is going or

has already gone bad.

One of the most important items in human diet is protein, which
provides eight essential amino acids, the building blocks of the body.
There are twenty-two amino acids. Eight are called essential for the
adult, ten are necessary for growing children. If those are included, t e

body can build the others. . ,

Meat is the most popular source of protein m the United States, u

the prime steak of today has come from beef that has been force-fed or

180 days with low-quality-protein hybrid grains sprayed with poison

insecticides. These go straight into the fat of the meat, especially into

the marbling, and, says Nichols, lead straight to heart disease. To pur

an extra 20 percent weight on cattle-and produce a multimilhon-dolkr

profit—the cattle raisers feed their animals diethylstilbestroi (DEb„

which can be carcinogenic in both men and women.

Though the FDA finally banned DES in the spring of 1973, it has
now been replaced by a compound called Synovex, which contains
estradol benzoate, considered by many experts to be cancer-causing.
Says Dr. Mortimer Lipsett, “Whatever dangers you want to attribute
to DES, you can attribute to Synovex.” Beef, steers, bogs, sheep, an
poultry are also still getting sixteen other drugs, singly or in combination,
which the FDA suspects are carcinogenic when ingested by humans. To
detect excess amounts of the toxin in meat, even if the entire army were
to join the federal meat inspectors of the FDA, it is unlikely they could
stop the chemicals getting to your table. And a huge proportion of our
meat is never inspected. Of the ten billion frankfurters eaten m one
recent year in the United States, about three and a half billion were
consumed within the states where they were manufactured; hence they

were not inspected. s

The organ meat of animals, says Nichols, is only edible if the anim ,

250 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

has been fed organically. The livers of prime animals are confiscated
much of the time because they contain abscesses and toxic substances.
Commercially grown chickens have arsenic and stilbestrol in their bodies
and much of it winds up in the liver. The liver is the detoxifying organ
of the body, and that's where these poisons go. Store-bought eggs are
mostly infertile, do not taste as good as fertile eggs, and are nowhere near
as good for you, says Nichols, because there is a subtle biological differ¬
ence. Hens that lay commercial eggs are cooped up where they cannot
move, have seldom if ever seen a rooster, let alone been caught by one.
“How,” asks Nichols, “can an unhappy hen lay a good egg?”

In the pyramid of life, plants play an essential role, as man cannot
ingest essential elements directly from the soil. They must be brought
to him through the good graces of living plants, which likewise feed all
animals, directly or indirectly. Via plant and animal our bodies grow out
of the soil. Microorganisms break up the chemicals in the soil and make
them acceptable to plants. Plants can synthesize carbohydrates from the
air, rainfall, and sunshine. But, before the life processes can convert
these carbohydrates into amino acids and proteins, they must have help
from the soil fertility. Neither man nor animal can synthesize the neces¬
sary proteins from the elements. Animals can only assemble them from
the amino acids, providing the necessary kinds and amounts of each can
be collected or produced by plants with the help of microbes.

Protein-producing plants demand a long list of elements from the soil:
nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus are required to make part of the protein
molecule; calcium and lime are also required; and magnesium, man¬
ganese, boron, copper, zinc, molybdenum, and other elements are
needed in connection with protein construction, even if only in such
small amounts as are called “trace.”

If the soil is not properly fertile, not teeming with microorganisms,
the whole process goes out of kilter or grinds to a halt. To keep the
microorganisms alive, great quantities of decaying organic matter need
to be added to the earth. On the forest floor dead plant matter and dead
animal matter go back into the land. Leaf mold, through decay, contin¬
ues to give life to the land, returning to the soil what the tree took as

nutrient.

Chemicals, Plants and Alan 251

I ,

■ I

I

I

I

I

I:

„ , ta « *,

composted, with the nght a <* e ™’ prod ’ uces strong, healthy plants

chemical fertilizers an P ^, h plants make strong, healthy animals
which naturally repel pests. Hea y P food-poor m

and strong, healthy human p JZ poor, sick peo

vitamins, minerals, enzymes, a an d go live in the

pie. Worn out land causes people to leave tn

slumS ' f et hut Diants grown on well-balanced, fertile soils do

It's a strange fact, but plants g _ own Q n poor soils,

not have the same attraction or Fert il e ^ y, av e a natural

artificially stimulated y c . t as a pro perly nourished body has

immunity to insects and dis J tcnd t0 gravitate toward a

SSSyjSSb- already been weakened by disease or

first to the land, then to chemical farming is practiced the

a- the companies that produce

* Slants with

nies began to ^^^"i.Tsupport of university professors. Three
hundred million pounds of different etiemic ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

under twenty-two *ousa" d ^ ^ ,, fe . of mass

destruction ofw*M* Michlg a n University

spraying, Dr. Geo g J- the test threat that animal life

on the record to say that P defore station, worse than

in North America has ever face pollution, possibly

worse than all these decimating factors fa ^ ^ aie

Not only wild life but fish in fresh ot insectl cides and herbi

gradually being poisoned by a com m ds prim!

ides. Yet the DDT which wiped ^ ^"ion of ehemid
target, the boll weevil, flourishing. Despite the app

?<!7

rHILDREN OF THE SOIL

pesticides the insects are gaining the upper hand, doing $4 billion worth
of damage to crops each year. And no amount of argument appears to
put over the fact that healthy crops are naturally pest resistant, keeping
the insects at bay.

In the book Silent Spring , which Justice William O. Douglas called
“the most important chronicle of the century for the human race,”
Rachel Carson made clear that the environment, which supports human
life, is being stressed to the point of collapse. As Friend Sykes foresaw,
doctors attribute to DDT and its more poisonous descendants the rise
in leukemia, hepatitis, Hodgkin’s disease, and other degenerative dis¬
eases. A correlation between the rise in the birthrate of mentally re¬
tarded children and the increase in the use of fertilizers and poisonous
chemicals is stunning. Twenty thousand mentally retarded children
were born in 1952, There were 60,000 by 1958; six years later the figure
had risen to 126,000, and by 1968 it was well over half a million.
Nowadays one child in eight is born mentally retarded in the United
States, according to Dr. Roger J. Williams, discoverer of pantothenic
acid and director of the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute in
Texas, the first biochemist to be elected president of the American
Chemical Society.

When Nichols realized what was happening to the country as a result
of both chemical fertilization and chemical pesticides he took two steps.
He went organic on his farm, and he sought other doctors and scientists
who had made the same discoveries. Together they organized Natural
Food Associates, of which Nichols became the first president. Their
object was to start correcting the situation with a nationwide campaign
to get the facts before the people, on the grounds that only an aroused
public opinion could save America from poor food grown on poor soil.
Nichols says he was determined to tell everyone just how to get natural
food: “No matter how old you are, which sex you are, what color you
are, where you live—north, south, east, or west, on an isolated farm or
in a big city apartment.”

By any means they could, Nichols and the NFA blasted the shib¬
boleth that America is the best-nourished, healthiest nation on the face
of the globe. “Nothing,” said Nichols, “could be farther from the truth.

Chemicals, Plants and Man 2 S3

The truth is that America is the most fed and the worst nourished natron
on earth. America today is suffering from a biological blight. We are
facing metabolic disaster. We are a nation of sick people. Heart disease
is rampaging through America; it is our Public Enemy number one.
is the leading cause of death among Americans. Fifty years ago coronary
thrombosis was rarely seen by a physician. Today it strikes even le
young. . .. Cancer, diabetes, arthritis, dental caries, and other metabolic
diseases are rapidly increasing. Even children are falling victim to

* Listing the facts, Nichols reported that sixteen hundred autopsies
showed that in every one of the patients past the age of three years there
was already disease in the aorta, the main artery of the body that carries
blood from the left ventricle of the heart to all the organs ana parts
except the lungs. In every patient past the age of twenty, disease was

already in the coronary artery. ,

“This should be evidence enough that practically everybody in the

United States today has cardiovascular disease. We have an epidemic.

And we have an epidemic of cancer. Cancer is now the leading cause

of death, after accidents, in children under fifteen years of age. Babies

are born with cancer! The American Cancer Society says cancer will

eventually strike one in every four Americans now living. Can a nation

call itself healthy when one of four must expect to get cancer, when

three of four who get cancer will die of it?’’

Almost immediately the agricultural chemical industry and the food
processors attempted to discredit the NFA, calling them food faddists,
quacks, and charlatans. They were accused of being unscientific. I he
initial detractors were soon joined by the U.S. Department of Agncu -
ture and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare,
operating through the Food and Drug Administration, and even the
American Medical Association. University professors, in search of fa
grants, supported the claims of the FDA, A campaign was launched to
make Americans believe that what the Natural Food Associates were
saying was pure myth. Newspaper and magazine articles, even.entire
books, were published in a huge effort to destroy the effect of NFA ana
its credibility with the public.

254 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

The U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare put out a
bulletin, “Food Facts vs. Food Fallacies,” in which it called everything
Nichols said a myth. To discredit Natural Food Associates and theii
objectives the AMA and the FDA organized a “Congress on Quackery,”
which toured the United States, holding seminars on food faddism and
quackery. As Nichols put it, “They were really after men and women
whose espousal of ‘natural foods* or organic foods* or ‘health foods*
threatened to lower the profits of the food industry.”

The stars of the show were Dr. Fred Spare and Dr. Jean Mayer,
chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University’s Medi¬
cal School, who insisted that to get a proper balanced diet all an Ameri¬
can had to do was go into the nearest grocery store and get a variety of
the four food groups: fruit and vegetables; milk and dairy products;
cereals; meat and eggs. The U.S. Public Health Department launched
an all-out propaganda campaign, supported by the food processors and
chemical trusts that make the poisonous food additives. Science editors,

food editors, and medical editors in the daily newspapers joined their
ranks.

When the NFA tried to tell the country that DDT was a cancer-

producing chemical they were labeled quacks and faddists; their charges

called a myth. In the end—after more than a decade of poisoning—the

FDA itself was finally obliged to label DDT a dangerous poison, though

pressure from agricultural interests caused the FDA to revoke its ban on

DDT in milk, and establish a legal tolerance for the amount of DDT
allowable in milk.

Although Australian investigators charged that BHT, or butyl-
hydroxy-toluene, an anti-oxidant (originally used to preserve color mo¬
tion-picture film), which turned up in processed foods, was teratogenic,
that is, it interfered with the development of an embryo, the FDA
allowed BHT as a freshness preserver. When newsmen questioned FDA
about its research they were told the papers were secret. In the end it
turned out there were only two reports on BHT in the FDA files—both
written by members of the staff of the makers of BHT.

|n I960 the panel on-food additives in President Eisenhower’s
cience Advisory Committee, which included members of the National

Chemicals, Plants and Man 255

Academy of Sciences, university professors, and representatives of the
Rockefeller Foundation and of cancer research institutes, stated that

“Americans today are better fed and in better health than at any time
in history_The integrated contributions of the engineering, agricul¬

tural and chemical sciences have resulted in increasing quantities of
uniformly high-quality and pure foods which have contributed demon¬
strably to the physical well being of the nation.

Thirteen years later FDA Commissioner Charles C. Edwards was still

insisting that it was “established” that the vitamin content of food is
not affected by the soil foods are grown in. “Vitamin or mineral deficien¬
cies,” he stated, “are unrelated to the great majority of symptoms like
tiredness, nervousness, and rundown conditions.’ He then proclaimed
that: “Scientifically it is inaccurate to state that the quality of soil in the
United States causes abnormally low concentration of vitamins or min¬
erals in the food supply produced in this country. . . There is no

relationship between the vitamin content of foods arid the chemical

composition of the soil.”

But there is still hope if we get back on the track, says Nichols, if we
begin to cleanse the poisons from every link of the food chain, so as to
restore the country to proper nutrition and avoid the long decline that
blighted North Africa and the Near East. To do so, and save the nation
from metabolic disaster, says Nichols, we must change from an economy
of exploitation to one of conservation. In the long run the country must
give up chemical fertilizers and gradually revive the soil organically.
Organic fertilizer can now be bought in a sack or packaged just like
ordinary commercial fertilizer, and at no greater cost. Deposits of raw
rock phosphate and potash with marine trace minerals and other depos¬
its are readily available.

A great advantage of organic rock fertilizers is that after a few years
of application they are no longer needed. Whereas the chemical farmer
is obliged to put on more and more fertilizer each year, the organic
farmer can put on less and less. Eventually the organic farmer will make

more money, as it will cost him less to operate.

Organic farmers say it is not true that a man with extensive acreage
cannot find enough organic matter. He has been told, says Nichols, that

256 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

he must steal from one acre to get natural fertilizer for another acre; but
in fact he can grow his own organic matter on every acre, by following
a few simple rules. And the organic method can be applied to any kind
of agriculture. All animal manures, garbage, perhaps even sewage sludge,
can be composted and returned to the land. If we could halve the waste
of these materials, says Nichols, we could double the fertility of our soils
and thus double the food supply.

The restoration of soil fertility, according to organic farmers, would
go a long way toward solving problems of floods and water shortages
which cannot be solved until organic matter is restored to the soil. The
usual 100 pounds of soil in East Texas won't hold 30 pounds of water.
But 100 pounds of humus will hold 195 pounds of water like a sponge.
Fertile soil is usually dark in color and soft to the touch. When it rains
the water soaks into this soil.

The construction of dams on rivers will never completely solve the
water problem, say the organic farmers. The underground water level
will continue to fall until organic matter is restored to the topsoil. As
Nichols puts it: “We must learn to trap the raindrop right where it falls,
instead of washing our topsoil into the rivers.” A third of the arable
topsoil in the U.S. has already been washed into the sea over the years,
and is still being lost faster than it can be replaced. During floods,
millions of tons of rich topsoil are washed downstream. Soil erosion costs
half a million acres of land a year. We live from about eight inches of
topsoil, containing earthworms, bacteria, fungi, and other microscopic
forms of life, that provides us with vegetation, trees, insects, and ani¬
mals. The only inexhaustible wealth is a fertile soil. Topsoil is the
greatest natural resource of any nation; civilizations of the past have
been destroyed when their fertile soils were lost.

In the coming age of famine, says Nichols, proper nutrition from a
fertile soil will be the first source of wealth. And we must stop con¬
taminating the rest of the planet. He warns that the massive use of
commercial fertilizer in the so-called underdeveloped nations of the
World will bring them the same massive increase in metabolic disease
mat we already have in America. Yet the chemical companies keep
Pouring out propaganda and pressure for greater consumption of their

Chemicals , Plants and Man 257

product. Dr. Raymond Ewell 7 vice president for research at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, who has been considered one of the
world's leading chemical economists, says blithely that if "Asia, Africa
and Latin America are not using quantities of fertilizer approaching 30
million tons by 1980, they are almost certain to be engulfed in wide¬
spread famine.”

Nichols, on the other hand, says that if we continue to exploit and
teach exploitation of the soil here and abroad, the result will inevitably
be war, just as it was when Japan went into Manchuria looking for
protein from the soybean. Peace in this world, says Nichols, depends on
conservation of natural resources, not their exploitation.

258 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

CHAPTER 16

Live Plants or Dead Planets

Among the independent farmers of the nation still working the land, a
band of hardy individuals have finally realized that the blandishments
of the artificial fertilizer and pesticide salesmen are questionable and are

setting about to avoid the harmful results of chemical farming before
it is too late.

Hereford is not only the name of a popular breed of beef cattle
developed in one of the English counties bordering on Wales, it is also
a Snia ll town on the upper reaches of the Palo Duro River, which runs
through the Texas Panhandle, a 170-mile-square area of the Lone Star
State which, about a century ago, was a wild short-grass prairie roamed

by thousands of American bison. For millennia the Hat plains of Deaf
Smith County, of which Hereford is the seat, produced a rich herbage
and a variety of succulent weeds whose roots extended through two to
four feet of clay-loam topsoil into the calicahi, a subsoil rich m calcium
and magnesium, drawing up these elements and depositing them as they
died on the surface to maintain a vital protein-rich graze for the wild
bovines. The minerals in the soil were delicately balanced and the humus
naturally provided by the dying vegetation along with the bovine drop¬
pings was sufficient to hold its own against the harsh climate, hot and
dry in summer, bitterly cold in the snow-sparse winters. It was only half
a century ago that farming began in the region; the first furrows were
cut into the land by the metal moldboards of plows; golden grain was
sown as far as the eye could reach. Where the land was not planted,

herds of cattle replaced the buffalo.

As the years went by, the farmers realized that deep plowing was

hurting rather than helping the soil. So they switched to breaking up the

rich clay-loam to a depth of merely six to eight inches with chiseling

tools pulled by low-horsepower tractors. At the same time they were

delighted to discover that water from underground aquifers could be

pumped up and applied to the soil to supplement the rainfall from

thunderstorms which intermittently turned the prairie sk.es into a dark

panoply of lightning-threaded cumulus and the creeks into rivers a mi e

wide and an inch deep.'*

By the time the children of the first generation of farmers had grown
into manhood, things had begun to go wrong in Deaf Smith Coun y
Dissatisfied by smaller harvests obtained from depleted soil, farmer
began adding artificial fertilizers to their land as recommended b
agricultural research stations and academic advisers. In less than
decade disaster was in sight. The chemicals were burning up the organic

material in the soil, upsetting the delicate natural balance of minera^

As a result, the soil began to dissipate. When mixed with irrigation watt
it coagulated into enormous clods weighing up to fifty pounds each. 1
break them up the farmers had to resort to huge 135-horsepower tract
capable of dragging enormous chiseling tools through the bnck i e c
sistency of their land. Some of the farmers, appalled at the prospect

260 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

an end to irrigation farming in the Panhandle, owing to the unmindful
application of the wrong kind of nutrients to the once rich land, were
determined to react.

One of these, Frank Ford, after graduating from Texas Agricultural
and Mechanical University, purchased an eighteen-hundred-acre farm
in Hereford on which the land was badly eroded because of the prevail¬
ing agricultural practices. 'There were gullies so deep you could hide a
tractor in them,” Ford recalls, but today they have all been filled and
the land terraced and leveled smooth.

Ford committed himself to organic farming, using natural manures
on his acreage and putting a complete stop to the use of pesticides,
substituting in their stead ladybugs to kill brown mites and other pests.
He also banished herbicides. Refusing to be persuaded, like other farm¬
ers, that his seeds should be chemically treated against wireworms and
rust, he resolved that he would not plant any seeds he could not eat.

In addition to farming, Ford put capital into Arrowhead Mills, which
specializes in the production of high-quality stone-ground flour with no
preservatives, as well as other whole, natural foods. To assure himself a
steady supply of organic products Ford had to persuade his fellow farm¬
ers to adopt organic methods. Attracted by his fair prices, a group of
them have now organized the Deaf Smith County Organic Farmers
Association, with the aim of not only growing healthier food but of
protecting and improving the soil of West Texas.

Working with this group is Fletcher Sims, Jr., who came to the Texas
Panhandle in 1949. One thing that caught Sims’ attention was the fact
that the first feedlots for cattle opened in the Panhandle, about 1965,
were beginning to pile up tons of cattle manure which no one knew how
to dispose of. Within a few years the waste from one lot two miles from
his home in Canyon, Texas, downriver from Hereford, had collected
into a pile over fifty feet high, covering forty acres, or more than thirty
football fields, requiring a fleet of bulldozers and other equipment worth
a quarter of a million dollars to pack. Sims further estimates that feedlots
throughout the nation contain millions of cubic yards of manure which
will eventually become,worthless as fungi reduce them to minerals.

At the same time it seemed to Sims that the agricultural schools were

Live Plants or Dead Planets 261

going out of their way to misuse the cattle wastes on the land- At Texas
A and M nearly one thousand tons of manure per acre was emg p
three feet under the soil, which Sims knew can do only vioknce to both
soil and manure, since in the process topsoil is buried, -bscd-pose ,
and the manure prevented from becoming aerob.cally fermented. An¬
other Texas college was pumping an organic slurry onto e s a cone n
trations that killed the crops; and an expenmental Nation not fa
Canyon was dumping raw manure at the rate o t ree un r
acre onto sod on the premise that it is only a waste product to be
disposed of. Other scientists were suggesting that building matena s e
tide from manure, one group in the state of Washington even working

on how to make livestock feed with it.

In the face of what Sims considered these sad and asinine approaches,

he realized that the manure could best be turned into -luable comp

Dr. Joe Nichols introduced Sims to the compos work that had been

done for years in Pfeiffer’s research laboratory at Spring Valley, N

Y °During several visits to Spring Valley Sims learned that compost
making goes through distinct phases; one in which original starches
sugars afid other components are broken down by bactena, fungi,™

other organisms; a second in which the new matenais are consumed by
microorganisms to build up their own bodies. It wa
importance, Sims was told, that the right kind of m.crofauna and m -
cXa be present and that the second phase be timed correctly so that

there would not be too much loss of organic matter

“If compost is not worked properly," Sabarth told Sims the or g,

proteins and amino acids break down into simple chemical “mpound^
In other words, organic matter gets lost as carbon d,ox.deor asrn rog
escaping as ammonia and nitrates. Many gardeners think of their com
posts as being 100 percent organic because all their ongmalmatena,
organic. But nature isn't that simple. Living cells have 70 to 90 perc
water, only 15 to 20 percent proteins, amino acids, carbo y ra es a
other carbon compounds. Only 2 to 10 percent ,s mineral; pot ■
cakium, magnesium, and the trace elements that arc inorganic. T
organic compounds can be preserved in the bodies of the microorgan

262 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

isms. They escape when they become free in some stage of the break¬
down. The N, P, and K concept comes into its own only when compost
has been mineralized, but by then the biological values have been lost.
In compost making you need to have a quick method for telling whether
bacterial action is breaking down nitrogen-containing compounds too
fast, which is indicated by the ammonia smell. If compost piles heat too
fast they must be turned to interrupt the ammonia production so that
bacteria rebuild more stable nitrogen compounds in bacterial protein.”

The standard tests of the American Organization of Agricultural
Chemists, Sabarth informed Sims, cannot reveal the state of matter in
which organic materials are present since they rely on combustion or
oxidation of compounds. The ashes give only the total amount present,
but say nothing as to whether they originate from minerals or from living
cells and tissues. Pfeiffer’s colored chromatograms so well define the
various stages of fermentation, whether decomposition, humus forma¬
tion, or mineralization, that after years of work the laboratory was able
to develop a Biodynamic compost starter with a proper population of
microorganisms for anyone’s use.

Sabarth showed Sims chromatogram pictures, one of which illustrated
how the material from a cranberry bog, though it contained an incred¬
ible 18 percent organic matter, was actually inert. Standard chemical
analysis would not have revealed its biological valuelessness. A picture
of adobe soil from California revealed that analysis of the minerals
within it meant little because it had no well-developed microflora, and
thus was infertile. When soils have only minerals but no organic matter,
said Sabarth, the plants in them are like people forced to eat salty foods.
They are driven to drink water and more water. Plants absorbing an
excess of mineral salts take in an excess of moisture. Though they look
lush to the eye, they are no longer in balance, and therefore no longer

resistant to disease.

To his amazement Sims learned that with Pfeiffer’s chromatograms
Sabarth had been able to establish scientific proof that certain plants,
beans and cucumbers, for instance, grow better if planted in conjunction
Mth each other, and that other plants, such as beans and fennel, seem
*° badly together. Furthermore, the storage together of such crops

Live Plants or Dead Planets 263

as apples and potatoes mysteriously robs each of its most life-giving
properties.

Pfeiffer came to realize that it is only our human egotistical point of
view that labels a weed a weed, and that if they were viewed as a
functioning part of nature, weeds would have much to teach. Pfeiffer
proved that a whole group of weeds, including sorrels, docks, and
horsetails, are sure indicators that the soil is becoming too acidic. Dande¬
lions, which lawn owners so feverishly dig up,' actually heal the soil by
transporting minerals, especially calcium, upward from deep layers, even
from underneath hardpan. The dandelion is thus warning the lawn
owner that something is wrong with the life of his soil.

Pfeiffer showed that daisies play the same role, in that analyses of their
incinerated ashes show them to be rich in calcium, the most important
constituent of lime. Pfeiffer doubted whether the orthodox view, hold¬
ing that the daisies have selectively “fixed” lime, was correct, since they
could grow in limeless soil providing there is enough silicon present
together with microorganisms. Pfeiffer came to the conclusion that,
when soil lacks lime, silicon-loving plants such as daisies move onto it.
When they die, they bring to the soil the missing calcium he had found
in his analyses. But he could not answer the question “How does the
calcium get into the daisies?”

Pfeiffer performed experiments on plant symbiosis to show that in
some way camomile stimulates heavier growth of wheat, with fuller ears,
but only when the ratio of camomile to wheat plants is no more than
one to one hundred. Thus his latter-day research confirms the age-old
wisdom of the Russian peasantry about cornflowers and rye.

Sims came to the realization that the prospects of Pfeiffer’s unique
tests seemed endless. He was fascinated that two chromatograms of
wheat, one grown with inert chemicals, the other biologically, looked so
different.

Sims took back with him to Texas a supply of the Biodynamic startei
composed of some fifty different microorganisms, many coming frofli
the outstanding soils of the world and each with its particular mission
to fulfill, both in the compost as it is being made and in the soil onto
which it is distributed. What makes the starter so inscrutable to tb<

264 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

average scientist is the faict that there are homeopathic quantities of vital

elements, enzymes, and other growth substances which work at dilutions
of up to 1,000,000,000 to 1.

Applying the Biodynamic process to what may have been the first
commercial compost operation using the Pfeiffer starter, Sims took raw
manure which he could get free from the feedlots and treated it in such
a way that microorganisms disassembled compounds in the waste and
assembled them into new and beneficial ones. At the same time disease
organisms and seeds from weeds or grains are automatically destroyed
and harmful chemicals are biologically degraded when the temperature
in the piles reaches 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Laying out piles of compost
m windrows, Sims turned them from time to time, using a machine of
his own design with a caipacity of six hundred tons per hour.

Within one month, his compost, having never been subjected either
to grinding or screening, became a fine, dark brown, friable, earthy
matenal, wholly devoid of manure odor. The cow dung was transformed
miraculously as it were, by biological action. As the farmers began to’
buy Sims s products and apply it to their land, startling results were not
long m coming. John Wieck of nearby Umbaiger, after only two years’
treatment of his soil with half a ton of Biodynamic compost per acre and
no other fertilizer or insecticides, and only two irrigations to supplement
some three inches of rain, was able to harvest a fantastic 172 Vi bushels

per acre of com, or more than double the maximum crop achieved on
the artificially nitrogenized lands of Illinois.

In the northern part of the Panhandle ten miles from Oklahoma's
ero ee trip, another Texan, Don Hart, whose irrigated land had
Wpmi to tighten up from the use of commercial fertilizers, realized that
e and his neighbor might soon be sitting on wasteland. Hearing of
•mss success, he not only began to compost his acres but soon started
composting business of his own to supply other farmers. Within a short
me he found that his soil felt like a plush, moisture-laden carpet
aerfoot. A reporter visiting his acreage in late 1971 wrote that anyone
o wanted to convince hi mself of the advantage of Biodynamic com-

one T y t0 r d , r ' Ve al ° ng 3 IOad where from the “ r could see on
side a beautiful crop of healthy com plants coming up on Hart’s field

Live Plants or Dead Planets 265

and on the other, planted two weeks before Hart’s, a virtual nightmare:
a few sickly plants starting out of hard-packed and cracked groun .

Southeastward across the enormous state of Texas, Warren Vincent
has been encouraging farmers to grow rice organically in order to combat
the rice growers’ main nemesis, barnyard or water grass, on w ich
herbicides of the kind used so devastatingly to defoliate the jungles of
Vietnam have been extensively applied. Vincent encourages his neigh¬
bors to rotate rice with Bahaia grass, which turns the land back to sod,
controls weeds, and makes an excellent pasturage for animals. Now that
consumers are beginning to discover that organically grown brown nee
is nutritionally far better than that grown with artificial fertilizer, other

pioneering rice farmers have dared to go organic.

In northern California, 120 miles south of the towering Mount

Shasta, which looks like Japan’s Fuji, four Lundberg brothers, owners of
Wewah Farm, have begun to grow brown rice organically. Though
converting to organic methods involved additional costs, they remem¬
bered that their father had taught them that any farmer worth his salt
has an obligation to improve the land he uses and, if possible leave it
to the next generation in a better condition than when he took it over,
a philosophy which, applied worldwide, could make of this planet a

Garden of Eden. , j £ .<

Despite generalized warnings against giving up the extended fam y

of chemical products, the Lundberg brothers located a source of manure
and composted it before working it into an initial seventy-six acres. Their
first crop averaged thirty-seven hundred pounds per acre, low when
compared to chemically treated rice, but high enough to be economi¬
cally feasible, given the premium prices paid for organic rice. T ei

initial experiment convinced them to go all the way an c ° nve j
whole of Wewah’s three thousand acres to organics. The Lundb g
next imported special milling equipment from Japan and established
their own organic processing plant. This would not remove the rice
protective outer shell, the nutritious portion of the grain and to some

Th^Ire now indications from not only the public but also notables
in California’s government and even in its universities that the Lun

266 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

bergs may be on the right trail. Floyd Allen, a reporter for Organic
(gardening and Farming, visiting the state legislature in Sacramento,
heard one assemblyman declare that the organic way was “a good
mother philosophy.” Allen was surprised to sit in the office of an emi¬
nent pesticide specialist at the University of California at Riverside and
hear the man announce: “I wish someone would do something about the
quality and taste of food. I’d like to eat a tomato that tastes like tomatoes
used to taste.”

The organic approach has also been adopted in the Middle West by
dairy farmers who wish to sell their milk to such producers as Eldore
Hanoi, president of the Wisconsin River Valley Cheese company north
of Wausau, who has been making organic cheese since 1962. When the
Grade A raw milk arrives at the company it is pumped directly into the
cheesemaking vat, completely by-passing pasteurization. No preservative
or color is added and no imitation ingredients are used. To preserve the
natural enzymes of raw milk, heating temperatures during manufacture
of the cheese are not allowed to exceed 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Hanni's
partner, Eldred Thiel, claims his cheese has the old-time flavor—“like
my Dad used to make.” The cheesemakers’ suppliers are certified by the
firm as “natural farmers,” who take up to five years to make sure that
no trace of chemicals remain on their land.

Among fruit growers who have seen the light is Ernest Halbleib,
owner of Halbleib’s Orchard and Organic Farm at McNabb, Illinois,
who refutes the almost universal assertion that apple growers cannot get
along without chemicals. Halbleib states that insects arrive in orchards
just to point out the very mistakes that man is making. Producers who
are fogging their orchards with deadly chemicals are finding that the
single application sufficient ten years ago now has to be repeated many
times in the growing season as bugs become resistant to instant death.

More than twenty years ago Halbleib went to Washington, where he
testified to the FDA against poison sprays, poison fertilizers, and poison
seed treatment, not a word of which he would take back today. Since
that time, he has watched his colleagues administer over five hundred
n ew chemicals to their trees. Today, says Halbleib, there is not one apple
grower in his fruit belt that is not in distress. They have used so much

Live Plants or Dead Planets 267

. • -1 fW the manager of the USDA chemallurgical plant

told hi* that 100,000 acres in ^ -a aJo«|>ave
been so toxified that they won’t grow grass or even weeds and tha
same is true for huge portions of once-nch potato land m the state

M "What do we want?” asks Halbleib. “To have children making then
blood with poisoned food? Have you looked into the reason for such

lame enrollment in insane asylums and hospitals? Insteadofpourngou
iThuild more of them, why doesn’t someone study the cause of

^Lee Fryer an agricultural and nutritional consultant who runs Earth

, . * nc st ates that in 1968 the figure spent on

Foods in Washington, U.L>., si htiMon This

■ , Wilbers in the United States exceeded V billion, ms

the Vietnam war, the whole of the United States of America s so.l cou

thefsuccessful use of seaweed as a natural fertilizer

■£" £2 m=£ tSttZ

”'S

■ L United States is Glenn Graber of Hartville, Ohio, who farms four

“roundworm was appearing on his tana anu m

wilting a large percentage of his crops as well as those of h.s nerg

268 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

Because the plague hit at a certain time of year, blame was universally
t on the weather. Graber also found from analysis that his soil in¬
dicated a lack of trace minerals. Raised on the NPK concept which he
had been following to the letter, Graber wondered what he could do to
improve matters. He learned that marvelous things had been accom¬
plished with seaweed at the Clemson College of Agriculture in South
Carolina, where researchers had used seaweed meal and a liquid seaweed
extract manufactured in Kristiansand, Norway, to achieve gains in sweet
peppers, tomatoes, soya and lima beans, and peas.

On the basis of the little-heeded Clemson research, Graber decided
to act, and ever since he has been applying kelp, imported from Norway
in granulated form, to his land at the annual rate of two hundred pounds
to the acre. Toward the end of the first season he noticed that healthy
green mold was forming in the tracks of his farm equipment, his nema¬
tode infestation was dramatically reduced, and the bluebottom eradi¬
cated. Since then he has never put a pound of artificial fertilizer on his
land, relying completely on seaweed, rock phosphate from Florida, and
ground granite from Georgia, and on bacterial action and cover crops

to produce nitrogen.

As his soil improved, Graber next realized that he was wasting money
on pesticides, and abandoned their use, turning instead to a spray made
of liquefied kelp applied at the rate of three gallons per acre over crops
throughout the season. Graber is not sure how the liquid seaweed acts
as a pesticide and says no research has yet been done to find out. Though
he does not entirely escape infestations of pests from his neighbors
fields, Graber believes that when he incurs a 10 percent drop in his onion
crop due to maggot flies, his neighbors are losing over half their crop,
in spite of every insecticide they try. He is convinced that healthy plants
on healthy soil resist pests naturally. To prove it he walked one visitor
through a field of parsley swarming with leafhoppers, which brushed
against their pants legs but were apparently not feasting on the best¬
looking and best-tasting parsley the visitor had ever tried.

Since his abandonment of commercial fertilizers, Graber has been
able to give up a plow requiring two tractors to haul it. By simply
cover-cropping his land with barley and rye, he not only adds humus and

Live Plants or Dead Planets 269

nutrients to the soil but allows it to be aerated by the plants’ strong roots
and by earthworms and microorganisms which flourish in it. The hard-
pan problem he once had disappeared as if by magic.

Another dividend to Graber is frost resistance. In one particularly
unseasonable cold spell, when the mercury dipped to a chilly twenty
degrees Fahrenheit, all of his freshly transplanted tomatoes and peppers
withstood the cold with not a single loss, though he remembered that
under the same conditions they all expired when artificially fertilized.

Graber thinks the problem of getting organically grown vegetables to
the consumer is compounded because the present organic outlets do not
have enough volume to warrant low-cost distribution in any one area.
He thinks the only road to travel is to work through large food chains,
which must find a means to isolate organically grown produce on their
shelves from the conventional supplies.

Such an approach has recently been pioneered in West Germany by
Latscha Filialbetriebe of Frankfort, a fast-growing family-owned super¬
market chain of 123 stores with a bent for innovation. Latscha has
introduced chickens, eggs, fruit juices, apples, and frozen green vegeta¬
bles which are guaranteed to have only minimal quantities of “residuals”
such as antibiotics, hormones, lead, and the full spectrum of pesticides.
All plant products come from farms cultivated along organic gardening
lines as developed by the German State Institution for Plant Protection
in Stuttgart

Latscha says that none of its controlled products costs more than 1 5
percent more than ordinary equivalents and that its juices and deep-
frozen items can be offered at prices under those charged for standard
brands. Though the premium it pays to a cooperative dairy to produce
milk without such additives as chlorinated hydrocarbons and DDT is
passed on to the customer, the certified milk has climbed to 10 percent
of Latscha's sales and the chain’s overall revenues have increased despite
a generally falling market demand.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Star Markets are beginning to act
somewhat like Latscha. They take a trailerload a week of mixed vegeta¬
bles that have been grown organically by Glenn Graber and market
them in separate bins.

270 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

Okver Popenoe, founder of Yes! Inc., one of the dozen natural-food
outlete in the metropolitan area of Washington, D C., applauding the
Star Markets effort, pub hi, finger on the reason why their example has
not yet been Widely followed: "The problem with most food chains is
that their management and staffs lack commitment to organic princi¬
ples, says Popenoe. “This makes it very difficult for them to market
organically grown produce which looks about the same, or even worse
to the tyethan chem.ca feed produce, and costs more. They suffer from
a credibility gap. Credibility is everything when .t comes to buying
organic produce. There is no way I know of knowing it is organic unZ
you su lect it to a gas chromatograph test for pesticide residues Since

P 7 f C ° S f ‘0 thirty dollars for each item tested, even

the most purist of grocers use them sparingly. [ think this is the main

reason why the market for organic produce is so thin. Unless one knows
one s farmer personally, or has great faith in the honesty of one’s grocer
one hesitates to pay more for an uncertain benefit ”

When Graber was asked how his fields compare with those of his

S :■ r ied dT didly: " In ideal weather «"**» C

everse. More important to Graber is the fact that he is confident that

havlTcTSv 50,1 “ ^ 8 ° eS I 0 "® Graber baS reCCntI * ^un to
he ordered enough of the product from Zook and Ranck in Gap Penn

ire rr r 80,1 for vegetabie cr ° ps * tbe rate ° f <«*> hundred

Set r' 1 r ab,e to whether the compel

an adverse rn ° V ‘ S,ted Zooit and Ranck ' s booth had

results a h m Tn t r b ° Ut Blodynanllc compost All of them had good
"Mts and were full of praise. “You can well believe that if a fanner had

<£fl > money for nothing,’’ says Graber, “he would be raising the very

ThtwcaTpacV f f T r ,, WOrk " lg 0 " e heCtare ° f land next the

U y o the University of Fribourg grows enough vegeta-

Live Plants or Dead Planets 271

bles during an eight-month season using the biodynamic method and
the help of only one assistant to feed the two hundred theological
students in the faculty's dormitories and send a large overflow to the
public market. “I could teach this method to anyone," says the farmer,
“as long as he has a natural or artificial supply of water. Just think what
this could do for Third World countries with their rising population and

food shortages.”

For all their success in organic farming, some farmers like Glenn
Graber feel that many organic proponents tend to be too “purist” and,
as such, have alienated the chemical interests who might well change
their closed thinking if met halfway. “It's about time the two camps got
together to determine what's right and what s wrong, says Graber. This
is also the opinion of Dr. John Whittaker, a veterinarian in Springfield,
Missouri, who is animal health editor for the remarkable new monthly,
Acres USA . Published in Kansas City by Charles Walters, Jr., the
magazine calls itself a voice not for organic farming but for what Walters

thinks is a better term: Eco-Agriculture.

Whittaker is nevertheless not at war with the chemists. He says that
what is needed is to create common ground on which organic-minded
farmers can meet with farmers who honestly have accepted the pro¬
nouncements of the chemical establishment. “On the one hand,” he
states, “the chemists have got to stop viewing the natural movement as
a group of little old ladies working in geranium beds. The truth is there
can be no sudden death of the technology now extant. There has to be
a phasing down, a buffering process, a marriage. We have to learn from

each other.”

Asked how technology might harmonize with nature, Whittaker
points to the development of metal proteinates, a process which takes
minerals and “chelates” or hooks them to organic matter such as pro*
tein. One of the clearest statements about how proteinates work is that
of Whittaker’s fellow veterinarian, Phillip M. Hinze, who looks upon
the physical body not only as a compilation of chemicals but as an

electric complex as well.

“The animal body,” says Hinze, “may be thought of as a very comply
battery that not only receives, stores, and uses electricity for chemical

272 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

purposes, but also maintains itself by assimilating vitamins, minerals,
amino acids and other products. The body recognizes these substances
when they come along. Every organic substance has an electromotive
property which determines whether it can be assimilated. When an
animal needs nutrients, a signal is sent out to capture that nutrient from
food that has been ingested. If there is no sickness, and the needed
ingredients are present, they will be assimilated. Unfortunately the
needed ingredients don't always correspond with substances considered
suitable for food. For instance, the requirements of the animal body for
metals are often met by feeding rations containing inorganic forms of
these metals. But it happens that inorganic forms of nutritionally essen¬
tial metals have different electromotive properties than the same metals
complexed with organic materials such as amino acids. A pig can't eat
a nail. It needs organic iron.”

So does the soil; overharvested, overirrigated and overgrazed, it no

longer contains the necessary organic minerals to produce good food in
the form of plants.

This truth has been recognized by Dr. Mason Rose, Director of the
Pacific Institute for Advanced Studies, one of the first educational
institutions in Los Angeles to break away from the standard university
compartmentalization of knowledge and to teach the manufacture of
soil humus and the breeding of bacteria.

Other groups, aware that man, having fouled his nest, must now clean
it, have been experimenting with ecological farming techniques. A sali¬
ent example is the New Alchemy Institute, which projects a host of
activities, including backyard fish-farming, in climates as varied as those
of the Canadian Maritime Provinces, New Mexico, California, and
Costa Rica. The New Alchemists say their trio of goals are “To Restore
the Lands, Protect the Seas, and Inform the Earth's Stewards.” This is
what the planet s vegetal covering on terra ftrmd has been doing since

oog before the advent of man to his stewardship. In that sense, plants
are the oldest alchemists.

Live Plants or Dead Planets 273

t

CHAPTER 17

Alchemists in the Garden

The medieval alchemist, whose dream of transmuting one element in o
another was maliciously ridiculed for centuries, may now be vindicated

—thanks to the efforts of living plants.

Early in this century a young Breton schoolboy who was preparing

himself for a scientific career began to notice a strange fact about the

hens in his father’s poultry yard. As they scratched the soil they con

stantly seemed to be pecking at specks of mica, a siliceous materi

dotting the ground. No one could explain to Louis Kervrari why he

chickens selected the mica, or why each time a bird was killed for t

family cooking pot no trace of the mica could be found in its gizzar »

or why each day the flock produced eggs with calcareous shells though
they apparently had not ingested any calcium from land which was
entirely lacking in limestone. It took Kervran many years to establish
that the chickens were transmuting one element into another.

Reading a novel by Gustave Flaubert called Bouvard et Pecuchet,
young Kervran came across a reference to Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, a
celebrated French chemist, who, “having calculated all the lime in oats
fed to a hen, found still more in the shells of its eggs. Therefore, there
is a creation of matter. In what way, no one knows/'

It seemed to Kervran that, if the hen had somehow been able to
manufacture calcium in its own body, everything he was taught in his
chemistry class needed reviewing. Ever since the end of the eighteenth
century, when Vauquelin's contemporary Antoine Laurent Lavoisier,
known as the “father of modern chemistry,” had laid down the principle
that in the universe “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is
transformed, it had been believed that elements could be shifted about
in different combinations but could not be transmuted one to another;
millions of experiments appeared to verify Lavoisier’s contention.

The first crack in this seemingly unshatterable wall around the atom
came at the start of the twentieth century with the discovery of radioac¬
tivity, which showed that some twenty elements could indeed change
into something different, apparently no longer obeying the law of the
conservation of matter. Radium, for instance, disintegrates into elec¬
tricity, warmth, light, and various substances such as lead, helium and
other elements. With the advent of nuclear physics, man was even able
to create certain elements which had been missing on the famous chart
drawn by the Russian peasant genius Dmitri Mendeleyev, because they
were thought either to have vanished radioactively in former times or
to have never existed in a natural state.

Ernest Rutherford, the British physicist who first theorized the exis¬
tence of the atom’s nucleus, showed in 1919 that one could transmute
elements by bombarding them with alpha particles—identical to helium
atoms less their electrons—a practice which has continued to the pre¬
sent time, with increasingly “heavier artillery.” But even these break¬
throughs did not shatter Lavoisier's dictum about the eighty or more

Alchemists in the Garden 27S

, . 1 fo f^Vipmists still bold that it is impossible to !

reactions occurring in living matter are solely chemical.

engineer'and W** *££ revered

^ts^one the calcium conten^of whi^r he had carefuUv measme^He

t“eckcd the calcium content in both the eggs and feces >ssu,ng

from the chicken and found the bird had produced four times as muc

. u i . j When Kervran asked his biochemist col-
calcium as it had inges ed. When Kema ^ ^ cQme from

leagues how the extra calcium originated, th y P

, h , «■*»-■. -oh. k “T" it*?^** .**»

gency, but it a cnic chicken deprived of calcium

t-Bxtt&zssss*

; j—= = -

dU Kervran also learned that about the time of WJJ.-"k
tochedTheycltained four times more lime than was
of lime from within the egg. This was long before scientists kne

anything about the atom, says Kervran, so it was too early o

^Chttof fervran’s friends pointed out to him that as far back as 1600

, i- «*«* ■ -*• «j«

It v J rs h ad riven the tree nothing but rain or distilled water. When

SS Zirf ,h.«* -aw ’»'K'”“>

pounds whereas the weight of the soil remamed =>PP™“™ tely
Helmont wondered if the plant had not been able to turn water

wood, bark, and roots.

276 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

Another vegetal anomaly which interested Kervran was that of 77/-
landsia , or Spanish moss, which can grow on copper wires without any
contact with the soil. When burnt there was no copper residue in its ash,
but iron oxides and other elements, all apparently supplied simply by the
atmosphere.

Henri Spindler, another French scientist, became fascinated with
how Laminaria, a variety of algae, seemed to be able to manufacture
iodine. Searching for answers in half-forgotten literature on the dusty
shelves of libraries, Spindler found that a German researcher by the
name of Vogel had planted cress seeds in a container covered by a glass
bell jar and fed them nothing but distilled water. A few months later
when Vogel burned the adult plants, he found they contained twice the
amount of sulfur which had been present in their seeds. Spindler also
uncovered the fact that, soon after Vogel, two Britishers by the names
of Lawes and Gilbert discovered at the famous Agricultural Research
Institute at Rothamsted, England, that plants seemed to extract from
the soil more elements than it contained.

For seventeen years the Rothamsted researchers cropped a clover
field, mowing it two or three times a year, and sowing it only every fourth
year, without adding any fertilizer at all. This piece of land gave cuttings
so abundant that it was estimated that if one had to add what had been
removed in the period between the arrival of one swarm of seventeen-
year locusts and another, it would be necessary to dump on the field over
5,700 pounds of lime, 2,700 pounds of magnesia, 4,700 pounds of
potash, 2,700 pounds of phosphoric acid, and 5,700 pounds of nitrogen,
or more than ten tons of the products combined. Where had all these
minerals come from?

Delving deeper into the mystery, Spindler came across the work of
a Hanoverian baron, Albrecht von Herzeele, who, in 1873, brought out
a revolutionary new book, The Origin of Inorganic Substances, which
offered proof that, far from simply absorbing matter from the soil and
• e air, living plants are continuously creating matter. During his life-
von Herzeele made hundreds of analyses indicating that, in seeds
s PK)Uting in distilled water, the original content of potash, phosphorus,
Magnesium, calcium, and sulfur quite inexplicably increased. Though
the law of the conservation of matter held that exactly the same mineral

Alchemists in the Garden 277

content in plants grown in distilled water would be found as in the seeds
from which they spring, von Herzeeles analyses proved also that not
only mineral ash but every one of the plants’ components increased, such
as the nitrogen which burned off during incineration of the seeds.

Von Herzeele also discovered that plants seemed to be able to trans¬
mute, in alchemical fashion, phosphorus into sulfur, calcium into phos¬
phorus, magnesium into calcium, carbonic acid into magnesium, and

nitrogen into potassium.

One of the many odd facts in scientific history is that von Herzeele s
writings, published between 1876 and 1883, were given the silent treat¬
ment by official academia, which was supporting the fashion that biolog¬
ical phenomena could be explained atomistically according to chemical
laws. Indeed, most of Herzeeles works never found their way onto

library shelves.

Spindler drew the attention of some of his colleagues to von Her¬
zeele’s experimentation. One of them was Pierre Baranger, a professor
and director of the laboratory of organic chemistry at the famous Ecole
Polytechnique in Paris, which, since its establishment in 1794, has
trained the best scientific and engineering minds in France. To check
von Herzeele’s work, Baranger began a series of experiments which were

to last the best part of a decade.

These experiments amply confirmed von Herzeele's work and in¬
dicated that atomic science might be faced with a veritable revolution.

When Baranger announced his discoveries to the scientific world m
January, 1958, before a distinguished audience of chemists, biologists,
physicists, and mathematicians at Switzerland's Institut Genevois, he
noted that if his investigations were further developed a certain number
of theories which did not seem to have the benefit of a sufficiently

experimental basis might have to be modified.

This cautious approach dictated by scientific mores was made more
explicit by Baranger in an interview for Science et Vie in 1959. “My:
results look impossible,” said Baranger, “but there they are. I have taken j
every precaution. I have repeated the experiments many times. I ha*;
made thousands of analyses for years. I have had the results verified by j
third parties who did not know what I was about. I have used severa \

278 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

methods. I changed my experimenters. But there’s no way out; we have
to submit to the evidence: plants know the old secret of the alchemists.
Every day under our very gaze they are transmuting elements. ”

By 1963 Baranger had incontestably proven that in the germinations
of leguminous seeds in a manganese salt solution, manganese disap¬
peared and iron appeared in its place. Trying to shed more light on the
mechanisms involved, he discovered a whole web of complexities related
to the transmutations of elements in seeds, including the time of their

germination, the type of light involved, even the exact phase of the
moon.

To understand the enormity of Baranger's work one has to realize that
nuclear science asserts that in order to form the stability of elements
such gigantic “energies of fixation” are needed that the alchemists,
unable to produce and direct such energy, could never have transmuted
one element into another as they claimed. Yet plants are constantly
transmuting elements in a manner completely unknown to science with¬
out having to resort to enormous modern atom smashers. The tiniest
blade of grass and the frailest crocus or petunia is able to achieve what

modern-day alchemists known as nuclear physicists have heretofore
found impossible.

M In speakin S of his new research, the quiet, courteous Baranger said:
“I have been teaching chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique for twenty
years, and believe me, the laboratory which I direct is no den of false
science. But I have never confused respect for science with the taboos
imposed by intellectual conformism. For me, any meticulously per¬
formed experiment is a homage to science even if it shocks our ingrained
a its. Von Herzeele s experiments were too few to be absolutely con¬
vincing. But their results inspired me to control them with all the
Precaution possible in a modern lab and to repeat them enough times
®o that they would be statistically irrefutable. That's what I've done.”

aranger established that seeds of Cerdagne vetch growing in distilled
water showed no change in phosphorus or potassium content. But seeds
^°Wing in a calcium salt solution varied their phosphorus and potassium
ntent by the enormous factor of 10 percent, and that calcium in-
sed in both groups. “I understand perfectly well,” Baranger told the

Alchemists in the Carden 279

science writers, who grilled him with every possible objection during the
course of their interview, “that you are astonished by these results. For
they are astonishing. 1 understand perfectly well that you are seeking the
error which could make nonsense of these experiments. But so far no
such error has been found. The phenomenon stands: plants can trans¬
mute elements.”

As upsetting and contradictory as Barangers experiments seemed, it
was pointed out by Science et Vie that nuclear physics itself has reached
a stage wherein its practitioners use four separate and quite contradic¬
tory theories about the atomic nucleus. Moreover, they add, the very
secret of life has not yet been found, perhaps because no one has yet
looked for it in the atomic nucleus. So far, they went on, life has been
considered to be mainly a chemical and molecular phenomenon, but
perhaps its roots are to be located in the most remote sub-basements and

cellars of atomic physics.

The practical consequences of Barangers findings cannot be overesti¬
mated. One of these is that certain plants can bring to the soil elements
useful for the growth of other plants, which could lead to many changes
in received doctrines about fallows, rotations, mixed crops, fertilizers, or,
as Friend Sykes found out through actual trials on his Wiltshire land,
the manuring of infertile soils. Moreover, as Baranger opines, nothing
prevents us from thinking that certain plants are capable of producing
rare elements of industrial importance. They appear to supply us with
an example of subatomic transformation which we are not capable of
performing in the laboratory without bringing into action particles of
high energy in exactly the same way we are not capable of bringing about
at ordinary temperatures the syntheses of innumerable products, either

alkaloids or others, which are extracted from plants.

' Kervran, a man with continuing ties to the land despite his urban
academic duties, began to be fascinated by another phenomenon of a
global nature which has long been known to agricultural specialists. He
read in Didier Bertrand’s Magnesium and Life, published in French m
1960, that each time wheat, maize, potatoes, or any other crop is har¬
vested, elements in the earth used by plants in their growth process are
taken out. Since virgin arable soil contains from 30 to 120 kilograms o

280 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

magnesium per hectare, Bertrand stressed that most of the earth’s arable
land should long since have been exhausted of this element. Not only
is this not the case, but in various parts of the world, such as Egypt,
China, and the Po Valley in Italy, soils continue to remain highly fertile
in spite of the enormous quantities of magnesium taken from them
through harvests of crops over thousands of years. Is it because plant life
is able to upset the periodic table of the elements, to make magnesium
from calcium or carbon from nitrogen, for instance, that lands have been
able to replace the products they need, wondered Kervran.

With the Celtic directness of a Breton, Kervran published his Biologi¬
cal Transmutations in 1962, the first of a series of books which offered
a whole new perspective on living creatures. It made clear that those
who believe in a system of farming which takes into account chemistry
alone are in for a rude shock and that man and animals nourished on
diets formulated by chemists will not long survive. Kervran freely ac¬
cepted the notion that Lavoisier was right as far as chemical reactions
were concerned. The mistake made by science, he said, is to contend
that all reactions in living organisms are chemical in nature and that,
consequently, life should be interpreted in chemical terms. Kervran
suggests that the biological properties of a substance are only inade¬
quately determined by chemical analysis.

Kervran wrote that one of the main purposes of his book wt s “to show
that matter has a property heretofore unseen, a property which is neither
in chemistry nor in nuclear physics in its present state. In other words
the laws of chemistry are not on trial here. The error of numerous
chemists and biochemists lies in their desire to apply the laws of chemis¬
try at any cost, with unverified assertions in a field where chemistry is
not always applicable. In the final phase the results might be chemistry,

ut only as a consequence pj the unperceived phenomenon of transmu¬
tation.”

Rudolf Hauschka in his brilliant book The Nature of Substance carries
ervran and Heerzele s ideas even further, saying that life cannot possi-
bl y be interpreted in chemical terms because life is not the result of the
combination of elements but something which precedes the elements,
atter, says Hauschka, is the precipitate of life. “Is it not more reason-

Alchemists in the Garden 281

able,” he asks, “to suppose that life existed long before matter and was
the product of a pre-existent spiritual cosmos?”

Supporter of Rudolf Steiner's “spiritual science,” Hauschka is lapi¬
dary in his approach when he states that the elements as we know them
are already corpses, the residue of life forms. Though chemists can
derive oxygen, hydrogen and carbon from a plant, they cannot derive
a plant from any combination of these or other elements. “What lives,”
says Hauschka, “may die; but nothing is created dead.”

Hauschka, who also duplicated many of Heerzele's experiments,
found that plants could not only generate matter out of a non material
sphere, but could “ethereal ize” it once more, noting an emergence and
disappearance of matter in rhythmic sequence, often in conjunction
with phases of the moon.

In Paris, Kervran, a pleasant and forthrightly cooperative man of
seventy with a prodigious memory for detail, told the authors that
powerful energies are at work in the germination process of seeds which
synthesize enzymes, probably by transmuting matter within them. His
experiments have also convinced him that lunar forces are extremely
important in germination, though botanists have long asserted that only
warmth and water are required.

“We cannot deny the existence of something just because we don’t
know about it,” said Kervran. “The kind of energies to which the great
Austrian natural scientist and clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner refers as cosmic
etheric forces must exist if only from the fact that certain plants will only
germinate in springtime no matter what amounts of heat and water are
administered to them during other parts of the year. There are varieties
of wheat said to germinate only as the days lengthen, but, when days
are artificially lengthened, the wheat does not always germinate.”

We do not know what matter really is, says Kervran. We do not know
what a proton or an electron is made of, and the words serve only to
cloak our ignorance. He suggests that inside atomic nuclei may lie forces
and energies of a totally unexpected nature and that a physical theory
to explain the low energy transmutations with which he deals must be
sought, not in the hypotheses of classical nuclear physics based on
powerful interactions, but in the field of hyperweak interactions in

282 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

which there is no assurance of the operation of the established lawsof
conservationof energy or even the existence of a mass/energy equivalent

Physicists, says Kervran, are mistaken in claiming that physical laws
are the same for the living as for inanimate matter. Many physicists
declare, for instance, that a negative entropy, a force which in biology
would build up matter, is an impossibility, since the second principle of
thermodynamics of Carnot-Clausius, regarding the breakdown of en¬
ergy, states that there is only positive entropy, i.e., that the natural state

of matter is chaos and that all things run down and become random,
losing heat and not acquiring it.

In contradiction to the physicists, Wilhelm Reich held that the ac¬
cumulators he built to collect an energy, which he named “orgone,”
permanently raised the temperature inside their tops, thus making non¬
sense of the second law of thermodynamics. Despite the fact that he
demonstrated the phenomenon to Albert Einstein in his house in
Princeton, and that Emstein confirmed the phenomenon, though he
could not account for it, Reich was considered mad.

Reich maintained that matter is created from orgone energy, that
under appropriate conditions matter arises from mass-free orgone, and
that these conditions are neither rare nor unusual. All of this further
suggests that in living nature there exists, below the level of Lavoisier’s
classical molecular chemistry, a deeper level of nuclear chemistry which
associates and dissociates nucleons, the components of atomic nuclei. In
molecular combinations heat energy is produced. At the nuclear level ?
much more powerful energy, that of fission or fusion as in A or H bombs,
must be added. What remains unexplained is why these fantastic ener¬
gies are not released in biological transmutations.

Science et Vie has postulated that if plasma-type nuclear reactions
rake place in bombs, in nuclear reactors and in stars, then there must
»e a wholly different type of reaction, specifically utilized by life, which
brings about fusion in a strangely quiet way. The magazine suggests the
analogy of a strongbox which can be opened by dynamite or by a
ination lock. Like the lock, the atomic nucleus can prove stubborn
confronted with blind violence but pliable to skillful manipulation,
be secret of life, so long suspected by vitalists, is as much a secret as

Alchemists in the Carden 283

the locksmith's combination. The cleavage between the animate and the
inanimate is to be found at the level of manipulation of the nuclear lock.
It appears that, whereas man has to use dynamite, plants and other living

organisms know the combination.

Kervran also wonders whether microorganisms can even take sand and
make it fecund. After all, he maintains, humus comes today from or¬
ganic matter but at one time there was no organic matter on earth.

This raises the question of whether Dr. Wilhelm Reich was not on
the track of the discovery of the century when he purported that he had
observed at the microscope energetic vesicles or “bions” which are not
alive but “carry biological energy.” Exposed to sufficiently high tempera¬
tures and made to swell, all matter, even sand, undergoes vesicular
disintegration, wrote Reich, and the resulting vesicles can later develop

into bacteria.

Kervran, who has now retired from his duties as one of France s more
eminent professors in order to embark on the career of a determined
alchemist, asks why chemically pure reactions such as the combination
of one atom of nitrogen and one atom of oxygen can be realized in a
test tube only at extremely high temperatures and pressures whereas
living organisms can perform the same feat at room temperature. He
feels that the biological catalysts known as enzymes are in some way

responsible.

In a yearbook entitled Alchemy: Dream or Reality? published in 1973
in Rouen by the students of the prestigious Institut Nationale Superieur
de Chimie Industrielle, Kervran writes that microorganisms are a con¬
centration of enzymes. Their ability to transmute elements is not a mere
hooking of peripheral electrons to form bonds as in classical chemistry
but involves a fundamental alteration of the nucleus of elements.

Most transmutations have been observed to take place within the first
twenty elements of the periodic table. They further always seem to
involve hydrogen or oxygen. Thus the transmutation of potassium to
calcium is accomplished through the addition of a hydrogen proton.

Kervran expects the phenomena he describes, and the data he sup
plies, to irritate chemists because it involves, not the displacement of
electrons in the peripheral atomic layers and the chemical bonding in

284 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

molecules which lie at the heart of their discipline, but the alteration
m structural arrangements of atoms induced by enzyme activities in
living matter. Since this takes place within atomic nuclei, a new science
distinct from chemistry is involved. Though strange at first sight, the
new language is so simple that the average high school student can easily
follow it. Thus, if one has sodium with eleven protons written n Na and
oxygen with eight protons written gO one need only add the protons
together to get nineteen, the number which exists in potassium written

: Following this reasoning, calcium (Ca) can come from potassium (K)
with the interaction of hydrogen (H) according to the formula jH plus
j$K equals 2 oCa, or from magnesium with the interaction of oxygen in
12 ^S P^ us sO equals 2 oCa, or from silicon with the interaction of carbon
in i 4 Si plus 6 C equals 2 oCa.

Since nature s atom smashing, according to Kervran, is performed by
biotic life, microorganisms are thus nature's prime mover in maintaining
balance in soils.

In Kervran's view some transmutations are biologically beneficial,
others dangerous. Since the harmful ones can be countered, the whole
problem of deficiencies in the soil remains to be reassessed. Indiscrimi¬
nate application of NPK fertilizers to the land can alter the content in
plants of just those elements necessary to healthful nutrition. In this
connection, Kervran cites the work of an American researcher, who,
knowing nothing of Kervran's theory of biological transmutations, found
that in hybrid corn too rich in potassium the content of molybdenum
decreases. “What are the optimal quantities of these two elements in
plants? asks Kervran, then continues: “This does not appear to have
been studied, and there is not only one answer, since values differ not
Only between species but between varieties of the same species.”

' Even if potassium fertilizers were no longer available to agricultural¬
ists, Kervran says, this would represent no catastrophe since microorgan-
•snis could produce potassium from calcium. If yeasts and molds for
Penicillin are already being produced on an industrial scale, why not
factories for growing microorganisms for the transmutation of elements?
Already in the late 1960s Dr. Howard Worne started Enzymes, Inc., at

Alchemists in the Garden 285

Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where microorganisms bombarded with stron¬
tium 90 were being mutated so as to produce enzymes that would
transmute waste carbon into usable carbon simply by having micro¬
organisms ingest one material and excrete a new' one. Dr. Worne is now
in New Mexico using microorganisms to transform solid waste from
garbage and stockyards into humus for the compost-hungry Western
states and methane gas for the energy-hungry Eastern states.

The understanding of the phenomena of biological transmutation,
though as yet unrecognized by the majority of the world’s agricultural¬
ists, seems to have been anticipated by the advocates of biological
cultivation, who, above all, realized that a price must be paid for reliance
on chemistry in a biological context Cultivation based on classical chem¬
istry alone, stresses Kervran, fails wherever intensive and abusive meth¬
ods are employed. The marked crop increases, such as those for the
Illinois com, can thus last only a certain time.

Though not applied as abusively as in America, where huge areas have
been lost to cultivation because of a surfeit, even the more limited
European use of artificial fertilizers has led, says Kervran, to a mounting
lack of resistance in plants to pests. The increase of infestation is no
more than a consequence of biological imbalance.

“Classical soil scientists and agronomists attached to the dogma that
biology equals chemistry,” writes Kervran, “cannot conceive that all that
is in plants has not been put into the soil. They are not the people to
advise farmers; farmers should be guided by the enlightened and intelli-
gent agriculturalists who have long recognized the division between a
purely chemical and biological agriculture. They might then achieve
their own conversion, and carry out some of the experiments described
in this book for themselves. If they are men of good faith, they will admit
their past errors, but one doesn’t ask that much—only that they act.’

Pointing out that the great English astromomical physicist Fred
Hoyle gave up the theory of the steady state universe which he utilized
for nearly a quarter of a century and which made him famous, Kervran
notes that Hoyle himself has recognized that if future observations
confirm that physics has taken a wrong direction then “the properties
of matter, the laws of chemistry, for example, would be completely
changed.”

286 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

i ■ - It is in bulletins such as that of the British Soil Association that
f Kervran sees articles confirming his ideas of biological transmutation in
the soil. In the French analog of this bulletin, Nature et Progres , one
researcher reports that, after analyzing month by month for one year the
phosphorus content of identical soils, one benefited by fermented com¬
post containing no phosphorus and the other by phosphorus-rich farm¬
yard manure, the first sample had 314 milligrams of phosphorus at the
year's end as against only 205 milligrams for the second. The researcher
concluded: “Therefore the soil containing the greater amount of phos¬
phorus was the one without any external supply of this mineral. A
miracle of the living soil.”

If Dr. Barry Commoner sees the buyers of artificial fertilizer becom¬
ing “hooked” on their product, Kervran says the same thing for plants.
Offering them chemicals, he writes, is simply drugging them to achieve
higher yields—for a time. He compares this process to stimulating

human appetites with an aperitif and then not following it up with a
meal.

Louis-Victor de Broglie, winner of the Nobel Prize for his prediction
of the wave properties of the electron, has said: “It is premature to want
to assess vital processes according to the very insufficient physio-chemi-
cal concepts of the nineteenth or even the twentieth centuries.” Kerv-
ran, who puts this quotation at the start of the British edition of his
book, adds: “Who is to say in which present-day branch of physics
Cental energy,’ the strength of will or character, should be placed? One
can associate memory with information and negative entropy with cy¬
bernetics (or should it be chemistry?) but nothing tells us if intelligence
itself will not someday be expressed by a physical or chemical law.”

Jean Lombard, a geologist, in a preface to Kervran’s second book,
Natural Transmutations, published in 1963, stated that Kervran had
opened up a wide field, which in itself could lead to clarification of

confusions in geological theory. Lombard also wrote: “The true workers
of science, who are always ready to welcome new suggestions, sometimes
osk themselves if the greatest obstacle to the progress of science is not
bad memory on the part of scholars; they wish to remind the latter that
»me of their predecessors were burnt at the stake because of proposed
oiterpretations' which have now become foremost truths. If pioneers of

Alchemists in the Garden 287

science were still being burnt, 1 would not give much for Louis Kervran's 1

skin.”

Reviewing Kervran's third book, Low Energy Transmutations, pub¬
lished in 1964, Professor Rene Furon, of the Faculty of Sciences at Paris
University, wrote: “This book completes the two previous ones. It can
no longer be denied that nature makes magnesium out of calcium (i n
some cases the reverse takes place); that potassium can come from
sodium; and that carbon monoxide poisoning can occur without inhala¬
tion of CO gas.”

It appears that outside France, not Western, but Japanese scientists
have been the first to take Kervran's work seriously. When Hisatoki
Komaki, a professor of science, read a Japanese translation of Kervran s
book Biological Transmutations , he tied Kervran's findings into ancient
Eastern cosmology and wrote to Kervran to say that the transmutation
of sodium, a yang element, into potassium, a yin element, was of far-
reaching interest, more especially since Japan has a. paucity of potash

deposits but ample supplies of sea salt.

Komaki abandoned his teaching to become head of a biological re¬
search laboratory at the Matsushita Electric Company and informed
Kervran that he would try to confirm the sodium-to-potassium reaction
and interest his collaborators in applying it on an industrial scale. Koma-
ki’s research proved to him that various microorganisms, including cer¬
tain bacteria and two species each of molds and yeasts, were capable of
transmuting sodium into potassium and that the yield of bacteria them¬
selves was enormously raised when only a small amount of potassium was
added to the cultures. Komaki has placed on the market a product made
of brewer's yeast which, applied to composts, raises the potassium con¬
tent in them. How this process relates to the action of Biodynamic
sprays as conceived by Rudolf Steiner and developed by Ehrenfned

Pfeiffer remains to be determined.

Kervran’s work is also attracting important notice in the Soviet Un¬
ion. Professor A. P. Dubrov of the Institute of Earth Physics of the
USSR Academy of Sciences, who has been working on the links between
radiosensitivity in animals and the geomagnetic field, wrote to Kervran
at the end of 1971 to suggest that the magnetic field of the earth itse

288 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

flpight well play an important role in biological transmutation, and that
elements might be affected depending on whether biological forms are
hriented north-south.

In 1971, a Russian book, Problems of Transmutations in Nature , was
published in a limited edition in Yerevan, capital of the Armenian
Republic. Its editor, V. B. Neiman, notes in a lead article, “Transmuta¬
tions in Nature: The Present Status of the Problem and Objects for
further Study,” that the fundamental problems of entropy and negen-
tropy must be re-examined, and maintains that the diversity of elements
on earth is due to a series of nuclear transmutations with analogous
processes applied to biological phenomena.

3 . Neiman dug out the most extraordinary quotation from Lenin’s
Materialism and Empirocriticism , proving that the father of the Soviet
Union tried to incorporate in his materialistic philosophy a notion more
palatable to vitalists and mystics than to hard-core Communist pragma¬
tists. “However miraculous, from the viewpoint of common sense,”
wrote Lenin, “the conversion of imponderable ether to ponderable
matter may seem, it is but a further confirmation of dialectic material-

* j *

ism.

a : In the same collection, P. A. Korol’kov contributed an essay on the
“Spontaneous Metamorphism of Minerals and Rocks,” in which he
shows how silicon can be converted to aluminum. In his summary of a
conference held in July, 1972, devoted to chrome deposition in the
Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet Far East, Korol’kov comes to
the conclusion that the traditional geological views on the genesis of
chromite and associated ores do not accord with new data presented at
die conference.

> “The fact is,” writes Korol’kov, “that we are witnesses and partici¬
pants in a scientific-technological revolution, that is, we are living in a
bine in which we are being subjected to a radical revision, not of
TOinutiae, but of the basic status of an inherited natural science. The
bme has come to recognize that any chemical element can turn into
pother, under natural conditions, And I am not alone in maintaining
this. I know a dozen persons in the USSR who hold the same views.”

If Soviet scientists are coming around to a whole new view of matter

Alchemists in the Garden 289

_and even citing Lenin on the possibility of its manufacture by the

ether itself—it would seem that the ecological revolution so necessary
to safeguard the future of humanity, and pleaded for in the United
States since Fairfield Osborn wrote Our Plundered Planet shortly after
World War II, may have a chance of taking place despite the host of
adversaries who see in it the demise of their personal fortunes.

In a review of the American edition of Kervran’s book for the Interna¬
tional College of Applied Nutrition, V. Michael Walczak, M.D., an
internist practicing in Studio City, California, said of Kervran s work:
“It offers a totally different approach to our understanding of nutritional
supplementation of the elements and how it functions in the physiologic
and biochemical pathways of our bodies. It attempts to prove that our
concepts of simple supplementation for deficiencies is not only question¬
able, but in serious error.”

Though many nutritionists untrained even in simple chemistry are
giving people huge and unnecessary doses of calcium because it is the
mineral in largest quantity in the body, Walczak, who is now limiting
his practice to internal metabolism and nutrition, states that his own
research shows that 80 percent of his patients—with diets supplemented
or unsupplemented—have too much calcium and too few' trace minerals
with respect to calcium. The lack of trace elements in soils, and in foods,
Walczak maintains, leads to an imbalance in enzyme function.

Walczak says he is preventing disease by administering the right
amounts of enzymes, hormones, vitamins, and minerals, which together
he calls “the key to life,” and also curing a host of degenerative diseases.
He concludes that the “gold” which the medieval alchemists tried for
centuries to derive from lead may very well turn out to be the secret for

obtaining good health and long life.

Walczak’s views are supported by Richard Barmakian, a nutritionist
in nearby Pasadena, who wrote to Kervrans American publishers that
the U.S. version of Biological Transmutations should prove to be “the
most significant work of this century, scientifically and possibly other
wise.” It was only after he had read the book that Barmakian thought
he might at last get to the core of the problem of calcium-metabolisrt 1
abnormalities and deficiencies w'hich he says are so tragically prevail

ip pseudo-civilized countries of the world today and especially in the
U.S-A/'

This view was echoed by Organic Gardening and Farming , now
published by J. I. Rodale's son, Robert, which stated that Kervran had
showed that current chemical treatment of the soil is totally wrong and
is rapidly destroying the quality of the soil worldwide: “We’re sure that
us our understanding of the life processes involved in organic farming
grows, the scientific community will be in for many surprises.” The
economist Charles Walters, Jr., publisher of Acres USA , also concurs:
“Louis Kervran has opened a door. His works have received important
recognition from Russians, Japanese, French and Chinese who don’t
have to ask the United States Department of Agriculture and the petro¬
chemical firms what to think, as is the case with too many extension
agents, land grant colleges and farmers under the thumb of bank exam-

* tt

iners.

If doctors, nutritionists, editors, and economists in the United States
are now beginning to see in Kervran the herald of a new age, as are
professional scientists abroad, it may be that a revolution is at hand.
Perhaps the time is near when the dictators of nutritional and agricul¬
tural policies, who have forced upon all natural life, from the smallest
microorganisms to human beings, a drenching of chemicals to the point
where the only recourse against adulterated food products is the growing
of one’s own private garden under natural conditions, will have to listen
to the prophets who have warned against the chemification of the soil
since the beginning of this century.

In an age in which science itself has become so specialized and the
science of life, or biology, so molecular that our technological society
seems to be producing a crowd of white-coated “idiot savants” who
Plead lack of competency in all but their own narrow divisions of knowl-
^e, the broad outlooks of Goethe, Pfeiffer, Howard, Commoner and
Voisin and the new discoveries by Louis Kervran may be the one an¬
tidote to catastrophe.

290 CHILDREN OF THE SOIL

Alchemists in the Garden 29J

1

CHAPTER 18

On the brighter side of life, a French engineer, Andre Simoneton, has
found a straw which may keep the population of the planet from going
under; his device, usable by man, woman, or child, is designed to make
it possible to select healthy food from bad before ingesting it: it is a

s >mple pendulum attached to a short piece of string used by diviners of
Water, lost objects, or the future.

For millennia the art or science of dowsing with forked stick or
Pjndulum has been practiced by Chinese, Hindus, Egyptians, Persians,

. es > Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans. In the Renaissance it was
re vived by such notables as Goethe’s predecessor as Director of Mines

1

1

in Saxony, Christopher von Schenberg, who had his portrait painted
holding a dowsing rod, a custom emulated in modern time by Lloyd
George, who had himself photographed in the same pose.

Though dowsing has not yet been accepted as a science in America,
in France it is no longer relegated to the domain of the witch and
warlock—despite the fact that over the centuries many a French dowser
has paid with his life for practicing “sorcery.” Among the more cele¬
brated victims were Jean du Chatelet, Baron de Beausoleil, and his
dowser wife Marine de Bertereau, who, working under the protection
of Marechal d’Effiat, Louis XIV's superintendent of mines, discovered
several hundred profitable mines in Franee only to be arrested for sorcery
and succumb in prison, she in Vincennes, he in the Bastille. The perse¬
cution has continued in France mostly against doctors who find them¬
selves dragged before tribunals for perpetrating dowsing cures on pa¬
tients officially declared uncurable.

That dowsing is no longer considered anathema by the Church is
thanks largely to the efforts of a long series of French abbes such as
Mermet, Bouly, Vallemont, Richard, Carrie, Descosse, and Ferran, and
the recent intercession in Rome of such an eminent churchman as
Cardinal Tisserant,

In the scientific community the art is now on the fringe of recognition
thanks to professors such as Yves Rocard of the College de France, head
of the physics department of the prestigious Ecole Nor male Superieure,
who is recognized not only as a brilliant physicist but as an admirable
dowser. His book on the science of dowsing, Le Signal du Sourcier, as
yet unpublished in English, has been translated in the Soviet Union
where geologists have recently been dowsing for minerals from airplanes
and helicopters, and also locating underground archeological artifacts.

The Mecca for dowsers in Europe is located in a small Parisian side
street, now lost between the luxury of the Faubourg Saint Honore and
the tourist-ridden arcades of the rue de Rivoli, appropriately named for
Saint Roch, canonized for protecting the populace against various pesti¬
lences. The actual Kaaba is an old curiosity shop called the Maison de
Radiesthesie, “radiesthesie ” being generic for dowsing and for the
search for radiations beyond the electromagnetic spectrum, an appelh'

296 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

tive given to the art by the Abbe Bouly, who coined it from the Greek
for “sensitivity” and the Latin for “radiance.”

On the shelves of this now venerable institution, run for the last half
century by Alfred Lambert and his wife, are scores of books on dowsing
—dowsing for water, for objects, and for health. In addition to those
written by Catholic clergymen, there are others by aristocrats such as
Count Henry de France and Count Andre de Belizal and by several
distinguished French physicians.

There are also brass and mahogany showcases protecting various ex¬
otic machines, some simple, some sophisticated, designed to tune in,
amplify or shield radiations, healthy or toxic. The machines are used
mostly by doctors from all over the world for diagnostic and curative
purposes, though the fundamental instrument in each case is the simple
pendulum. These lie in stacked drawers on velvet cushions designed in
many shapes and sizes from various materials, including ivory, jade, and

octagonal quartz or crystal, though any weight on any string or chain is
said to be effective.

In the United States, Dr. Zaboj V. Harvalik, a professional physicist
recently retired from his post as scientific adviser to the U.S. Army's
Advanced Material Concepts Agency to devote himself to private re¬
search, has turned his attention to the dowsing phenomenon and to how
physical theory might help to explain it. As chief of the research commit¬
tee of the American Society of Dowsers, Harvalik is helping to break

down fifty years of prejudice in official circles against dowsing as a
“quack art.”

At his home on the banks of the Potomac River in Lorton, Virginia,
Harvalik has made meticulous tests to reveal for the first time that
dowsers react with varying degrees of sensitivity to polarized electromag¬
netic radiation, artificial alternating magnetic fields in a frequency range
from one to one million cycles per second and to DC magnetic fields.
Harvalik is convinced that dowsers pick up magnetic field gradients

whether they are trying to find water, underground pipes, wires, tunnels,

01 geological anomalies.

Dowsing, however, appears to extend far beyond the detection of
owing water or the magnetic field gradients thought to be associated

Dowsing Plants for Health 297

with water currents. In its broadest definition it is simply searching —
for anything. The former president of the American Society of Dowsers,
John Shelley, before his premature death in 1972, amazed his fellow
naval reserve officers when at the end of a training session at the Pen¬
sacola, Florida, Naval Air Station he was able, by using only a small
dowsing rod, to locate his government salary check, which his colleagues
had conspired with the help of the paymaster to hide somewhere in a
huge two-story naval building with dozens of rooms branching out of its

corridors.

Gordon MacLean, a research chemist for Pine State By-Products in
Portland, Maine, who still works full time despite his eighty-odd years,
will take any visitor out to the Coast Guard lighthouse at Portland Head
and with his “divining” rod accurately predict when the next oil tanker
on its way into Portland harbor will appear on the horizon and where.

Perhaps the most celebrated American dowser is Henry Gross, also
of Maine, to whose feats Kenneth Roberts, the American historical
novelist, devoted three books in the 1950s. Like the French abbots,
Gross is an expert at dowsing from maps. Sitting at his kitchen table,
he pinpointed on a map of the British-governed island of Bermuda, on
which no source of water had been found, just those spots where he said
drilling would produce it. To everyone’s amazement, Gross was correct.

To physicists like Harvalik the forces at work in map dowsing, which
do not appear to be related to the magnetic gradients operative in field
dowsing, are totally inscrutable. Obviously a dowser is contacting some
source of information which can provide accurate data on areas—or
parts of space—far removed from his own physical location. Rexford
Daniels, whose Interference Consultants Company of Concord, Massa¬
chusetts, has been pioneering the study for twenty-five years of how
proliferating electromagnetic emissions interfere with one another and
may work harmful environmental effects on man, states that he has
become convinced that some overall force exists in the universe which
is itself intelligent and provides answers, Daniels theorizes that this force
operates through a whole spectrum of frequencies not necessarily linked
to the electromagnetic spectrum and that human beings can mentally
interact with it. To Daniels dowsing is simply an as yet imperfectly

298 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

l

J

■ 4

I

I defined though exceedingly useful commnications system. In his eyes
ad important task confronting man nows to check out the system in
3 |1 of its aspects.

The specific technique of dowsing foocfor freshness and vitality was
learned by engineer Simoneton, now alj> in his eighties—though he
looks like a successful French businessma in his sixties—from another
extraordinary Frenchman, Andre Bovis, sfragile tinker who died in his
native Nice during the Second World Wf. Bovis is most widely known
for his experiments with pyramids built t the dimensions of the Great
pyramid of Cheops, which he found woui mysteriously dehydrate and
mummify dead animals without decompsing them, especially if they
were placed in a pyramid at the relative bight of the King’s Chamber,
or one third of the way from the base t( the summit.

Basic to Bovis' theory is that the earth as positive magnetic currents
running north to south, negative magneticcurrents running east to west.
He says that these currents are picked u] by all bodies on the surface
of the earth, and that any body placed im north-south position will be
more or less polarized, depending on is shape and consistency. In
human bodies these telluric currents, bob positive and negative, enter
through one leg and go out through the oposite hand. At the same time
cosmic currents from beyond the earth eter through the head and go
out through the other hand and foot. Th< currents also go out through
the open eyes,

All bodies containing water, says Bovis, ccumulate these currents and
can radiate them slowly. As the currents g* out and act and react against
other magnetic forces in objects, they aff-ct the pendulum held by the
dowser. Thus the human body, as a varialle condenser, acts as a detec¬
tor, selector and amplifier of short and ultra-short waves; it is a go-
between for the animal electricity of Gavani and the inanimate elec¬
tricity of Volta.

At the same time the pendulum, say Bovis, acts as a perfect lie
detector in that if a person is frankly sayiig what he thinks about some
subject, it will not affect the radiations md thus not affect the pen¬
dulum; but anyone saying something diffeent from what he is thinking
Ganges the wavelengths, making them horter and negative.

lowing Plants for Health 299

Bovis developed a pendulum from a similar device which he says was
used by the ancient Egyptians, made from crystal with a fixed metal
point suspended on a double strand of red and violet silk. He called it
"paradiamagnetique” because it is sensitive to objects which are either
attracted or repelled by a magnet. Bodies which are attracted, such as
iron, cobalt, nickel, magnesium, chrome, or titanium, be called paramag¬
netic; those which are repelled, such as copper, zinc, tin, lead, sulfur and
bismuth, he called diamagnetic. By placing a small magnetic field in the
form of a solenoid between the dowser and the pendulum he claimed
to be able to pick up very faint currents such as those emanating from
a non fecundated egg. He explained the use of red and violet strands as
increasing the sensitivity of his pendulum on the grounds that red light
vibrations are the same as the atomic vibrations of iron, which are
paramagnetic, and those of violet being the same as copper, which are

diamagnetic.

Bovis found that with his pendulum he could tell the intrinsic vitality
and relative freshness of different foods within their protective skins
because of the power of their radiations. To measure with his pendulum
the varying radiant frequencies produced by foods Bovis developed a
biometre , or simple ruler arbitrarily graduated in centimeters to indicate
microns, which are thousandths of a millimeter, and angstroms, which
are a hundred times smaller, covering a band between zero and ten
thousand angstroms.

By placing a piece of fruit or vegetable, or any kind of food, at one
end of the ruler, Bovis could watch his swinging pendulum change
directions at a certain distance along the ruler, which gave him an
indication of the degree of the food’s vitality. According to Bovis the
limit of any object's radiance is overcome at some point by the general
telluric field surrounding it, and can thus be measured. Dowsers main¬
tain that any two objects of the same material and size placed a yard or
so apart will create two fields which will repel each other at a halfway
mark easily noted with a pendulum. Increasing the size of one of the
objects will cause its field to move closer to the smaller object.

Simoneton found that food which radiates 8,000 to 10,000 angstroms
on Bovis’ biometre would also cause a pendulum to turn at the remarka¬

300 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

ble speed of 400 to 500 revolutions per minute in a radius of 80 millime¬
ters. Foods which radiate between 6,000 and 8,000 spun it at a rate of
300 to 400, with a radius of 60 millimeters. Meats, pasteurized milk, and
overcooked vegetables, which radiate less than 2,000 angstroms, have
not sufficient energy to make the pendulum spin.

For those who might complain about the arbitrary selection of ang¬
stroms for measuring the relative radiant vitality of objects, Louis Kerv-
ran, in a preface to Simoneton’s book, Radiations des Aliments , points
out that the angstrom is no more arbitrary than the calorie used in
nutrition—a calorie being the quantity of heat required to raise the
temperature of one gram of water one degree centigrade. All systems of
measurement, says Kervran, are conventional; Bovis’ angstrom merely
made it easy to distinguish between the radiant value of fermented
cheese, which reads at 1,500, and that of fresh olive oil, which reads at
8,500. In any case, Kervran adds, the wavelengths emitted by fruits and
vegetables and other biochemical foodstuffs which are picked up with
the pendulum are of totally unknown nature, apparently outside the
electromagnetic spectrum. It is simply the fact that they are measurable
by dowsing methods which remains of great practical value.

According to Bovis, wavelengths broadcast by an object are picked up
by the nerves in a human arm and then amplified by means of a
pendulum swinging at the end of a string. Impressive proof of this has
been established in Montreal by Jan Merta, whose laboratory experi¬
ments clearly indicate that a minute muscular movement occurs in the
area of the wrist a fraction of a second after a change in the encephalo-
graph has been registered. Merta has also designed a dowsing device,
which can be placed not only in the hands but on the arms, shoulders,
head, legs, or feet, or any other part of the body where it can be
balanced.

In line with Bovis and Lakhovsky, Simoneton reasoned that if human
nerve cells can receive wavelengths they must also be transmitters:
senders and receivers must be able to enter into resonant vibration with
each other in order to pick up a transmission. Lakhovsky likened the
system to two well-tuned pianos: when a note is struck on one it will
cause the same note to vibrate on the other.

Dowsing Plants for Health 301

Some dowsers say that the prime sensor in the human body may be
located in the area of the solar plexus. This appears to be borne out by
Harvalik's most recent research. To shield parts of the human body from
the effects of the ocean of magnetic forces surrounding it, Harvalik took
an eight-foot-by*ten-inch strip of highly effective magnetic shielding
(made from a Co-Netic AA Perfection Annealed sheet 0.025 inches
thick, produced by the Magnetic Shield Division of the Perfection Mica
Company) and rolled it into a two-layered cylinder which could be
lowered around the body to shield head, shoulders, torso, or pelvic area.

With the shield covering his head, Harvalik walked blindfolded across
a level area known to produce dowsing signals and obtained a strong
reaction over each of three dowsing zones. The same reactions were
obtained with his head exposed but his shoulders shielded. Gradually
lowering the shield, Harvalik found that he could pick up dowsing
signals until he reached an area between the 7th and 12th rib, that is
to say from sternum to navel.

“These measurements," says Harvalik, “suggest that dowsing sensors
must be located in the region of the solar plexus and that perhaps there
are additional sensors in the head or brain.”

Dr.J. A. Kopp of Ebikon, Switzerland, who for years has been work¬
ing with dowsing techniques to locate geopathogenic zones that seem
to be related to high incidences of cancer, reported in 1972 that a
German engineer, in an experiment analogous to those of Harvalik, had
himself carried horizontally on a stretcher over a dowsing zone. As his
head passed the dowsing zone, the rod was undisturbed; when his solar
plexus was above the same zone, the dowsing rod immediately reacted.

Using a pendulum to establish the relative radiance of different foods
was a technique developed by Simoneton as a matter of life or death.
During the First World War he underwent five operations. One dark
night lying on a stretcher by a hospital train he overheard two medics
whispering in the shadows cast by a kerosene lantern that he was so
severely tubercular there was no chance of his recovery. A forced diet
of rich food ruined his liver and gave him other unpleasant side effects.
Barely surviving the ministrations of the medics, Simoneton discovered
Bovis’ system of selecting fresh and vital foods from poisonous fare. In

302 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

a short time he rid himself not only of the TB but of its side effects and
became so healthy that years later, at sixty-six and sixty-eight he still
fathered children, and at seventy was still playing tennis.

As a young engineer Simoneton had been drafted into the French
army to work on the new science of radio, which, says Simoneton, was
in those days at about the level that dowsing is today. During World
War I Simoneton worked alongside such electrical luminaries as physi¬
cist Louis de Broglie, who was to establish that every particle, down to
a photon of light, is associated with a specific wavelength.

With this background Simoneton had enough, electrical engineering
and radio knowledge not to dismiss Bovis as a quack, and was able to
establish empirically that with Bovis' system he could measure specific
wavelengths from foods that indicated both vitality and freshness. Milk,
which he measured at 6.5 thousand angstroms when fresh, lost 40
percent of its radiation by the end of twelve hours and 90 percent by
the end of twenty-four. As for pasteurization, Simoneton found that it
killed the wavelengths dead. The same he found true of pasteurized fruit
and vegetable juices. Garlic juice, when pasteurized, coagulated like

dead human blood and its vibrations dropped from around eight thou¬
sand angstroms to zero.

On the other hand freezing fresh fruit and vegetables has the effect
of prolonging their life; on defrosting they resume their radiance at
almost the same level as when they were iced. Food placed in a refrigera¬
tor will deteriorate, but at a much slower pace. Unripe fruits and vegeta-

es in a refrigerator may actually increase in radiance as they slowly
mature.

Dehydrated fruit was found by experiment to retain its vitality if
soaked in “vitalized” water for twenty-four hours, even several months
after drying, it would reradiate almost as strongly as when freshly picked
Canned fruits remained perfectly dead. Water turned out to be a very
strange medium: normally unradiant, it was capable of being “vitalized”
y association with minerals, human beings, or plants. Some waters, such
as those at Lourdes, Bovis found, in 1926, to radiate as high as 156,000

7^nrv? mS EigHt ye3rS latCr SOme ° f the same water sti11 registered
,UOO angstroms. The Czech-born psychic Jan Merta holds that the

Dowsing Plants for Health SOS

rind from apples, pears, and other fruits and vegetables, when left to soak
in a glass of water overnight, releases healthful vibrations into the water
which can then be drunk to provide better nourishment than the rind
itself, which has little or no effect on Simoneton's pendulum.

To simplify life for readers of his book, Simoneton divided foods into
four general classes. In the first he placed those foods whose radiant
wavelength he found higher than the basic human wavelength of 6,500
angstroms, going up to 10,000 or higher. These include most fruits,
which run between 8,000 and 10,000 at the peak of their maturity, and
vegetables if eaten fresh from the garden. Simoneton noted that by the
time most vegetables get to the market in town they have lost one-third
of their potency; by the time they have been subjected to cooking, they
have lost another third.

Simoneton says fruits are filled with solar radiation in the healthful
light spectrum between the bands of infrared and ultraviolet, and that
their radiance rises slowly to a peak while ripening, then gradually
decreases to zero at putrefaction. The banana, which is healthily edible
for about eight days out of a span of twenty-four between the time it
is picked and when it starts to rot, gives off optimum vibrations when
it is yellow, not so good when green, and very low when black.

Anyone who has lived in pineapple-growing areas of the world such
as the Hawaiian islands knows that a pineapple picked and eaten at the
precise time of its ripening—a period lasting no longer than a few hours
—has a delicious taste which amazes people who have only eaten store-
bought fruit picked long before they come to maturity.

Vegetables are most radiant if eaten raw, two raw carrots being better
than a plateful of cooked ones. The potato, which has a radiance of only
2,000 angstroms when raw (perhaps because it grows underground hid¬
den from the sun), mysteriously rises to 7,000 angstroms when boiled
and all the way to a very healthy 9,000 when baked. The same applies
to other tubers.

Legumes, such as peas, beans, lentils, or chickpeas, rate 7,000 to 8,000
when fresh. Dried they lose most of their radiance. They become heavy,
indigestible, and hard on the liver, says Simoneton. To benefit from
legumes they too should be eaten raw and freshly picked. Optimum

304 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

j^sults, says Simoneton, come from their juices, especially if drunk at 10
A ,M- and 5 p.m. when they are easily digested and do not tire the system
but nourish it.

On Simoneton’s scale wheat has a radiance of 8,500 angstroms; when
cooked this rises to 9,000. He says wheat can and should be eaten in a
variety of ways rather than simply in bread. Whole-wheat flour should
be mixed into pies, tarts, and other pastries with butter, eggs, milk,
fruits, and vegetables. Baked in a wood-burning oven, bread gives off
even better radiations than if cooked with coal or gas.

Olive oil was found by Simoneton to have a high radiance of 8,500,
and to be extremely long-lasting. Six years after pressing it still gives off
around 7,500. Butter, which radiates about 8,000, is good for about ten
days before it starts to fall off, reaching bottom in about twenty days.

Ocean fish and shellfish are good foods with a bright radiance from
8,500 to 9,000 especially if caught fresh and eaten raw. This includes
crabs, oysters, clams, and other shellfish. Lobsters, says Simoneton, are

best cut in half while live and broiled on a wood fire. Fresh water fish
is much less radiant.

In Simoneton’s second category he places foods radiating from 6,500
down to 3,000 angstroms. These include eggs, peanut oil, wine, boiled
vegetables, cane sugar, and cooked fish. He rates a good red wine be¬
tween 4,000 and 5,000, and says it is a better drink than devitalized city
water, and certainly better than coffee, chocolate, liquor, or pasteurized
fruit juices, which have virtually no radiance.

Echoing Nichols, Simoneton says that, whereas the juice of a fresh
sugar beet gives 8,500 angstroms, refined beet sugar can fall as low as
1,000, and the white lumps that get wrapped in papers are down to zero.

Of meats, the only one that makes Simoneton’s list of edible foods
is freshly smoked ham. Freshly killed pork radiates at 6,500, as: does all
animal meat; but once it has been soaked in salt and hung over a wood
nre its radiance rises to 9,500 or 10,000 angstroms. Other meats are
almost pointless to eat; they are an exercise in tough digestion, which
Wears out rather than vitalizes the eater, requiring him to drink coffee
® keep from falling asleep.

Cooked meats, sausages, and other innards are all in Simoneton’s

Dowsing Plants for Health 305

third category along with coffee, tea, chocolate, jams, fermented
cheeses, and white bread. Because of their low radiation they do one
little or no good, says Simoneton.

In his fourth category are margarines, preserves, alcohols, liquors,
refined white sugar, and bleached white flour: all dead as far as radiations
are concerned.

Applying his technique for measuring wavelengths directly to human
beings, Simoneton found that the normal healthy person gives off a
radiance of about 6,500 or a little higher, whereas the radiations given
off by tobacco smokers, alcohol imbibers, and carrion eaters are uni¬
formly lower. Bo vis claimed that cancer patients give off a wavelength
of 4,875, which, he noted,-was the same wavelength as that of over-
refined white French bread before the Second World War.

However, because a cancer victim will radiate this low level long
before any overt symptom of his disease is in evidence, Bovis pointed
out that it is possible to take remedial steps well before the ailment has
made serious inroads into the body’s cellular tissue.

It is Bovis and Simoneton’s thesis that human beings should eat fruit,
vegetables, nuts, and fresh fish that give off radiations higher than their
own normal 6,500, if they wish to energize themselves and feel healthy.
They believe that low-radiance foods, such as meats and bad bread,
instead of bringing vitality to the body, sap the body of its existing
vitality and that that is why one can feel heavy and devitalized from a
meal one expected to replenish one’s energy.

From the fact that most microbes read well below 6.5 thousand
angstroms, Simoneton, like Lakhovsky, deduces that they can only affect
a human being whose vitality has been lowered to a point where cells
resonate at their wavelength, whereas a body with a healthy vitality
remains immune to attack by microbes. This gives a raison d'etre for
deadly microbes in an ordered universe. The same principle, no doubt,
explains why plants whose radiance has been reduced by chemical fertil¬
izers are subject to attack by pests.

It struck Simoneton that the therapeutic marvels attributed since the
dawn of history to herbs, flowers, roots, and barks might not be due
simply to their chemical content, but the healthy wavelengths they
radiate. Though the apothecary’s shelves are still stocked with chemical

306 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

der.Vat.ves from plants and herbs, their curative powers no longer appear
JO miraculous. The secret of their potency seems to have been lost
Old wives and hermits are still reputed to know and understand the
mysterious healmg powers of plants, but they must have acquired their
knowledge by some extra sense, or the woods would be strewn with the

corpses of accidented sages, poisoned by belladonna, deadly nightshade
and a host of other noxious weeds.

Simoneton believes the day will soon come when vaccines are made

not from the bodies or carcasses of animals but from the radiant juice

of plants. To set the world right Simoneton envisages doctors with

headphones like radio operators, able to diagnose by the frequencies they

receive from patients just what ails them, able to broadcast to them just
the frequencies required to set things right.

. Per 7 PS th f mOSt informed doctor in the h “Kng P°wer of plants was
Paracelsus, who acqmred his lore from old European herbalists, from

w.se men of the East, but primarily from the direct study of nature.

According to his “doctnne of sympathetic resemblances” all growing

thrags reveal through their structure, form, color, and aroma, their

pecuhar usefulness to man. Paracelsus recommended that a physician sit

quretly ,n a meadow, relax and soon notice “how the blossoms follow the

■nobon of the planets, opening their petals according to the phases of

the moon, by the cycle of the sun, or in response to distant stars.”

, A m0d “ n fo ' lower ° f Paracelsus who turned out to be an extraordi-
ry wizard wrth herbs and plants was a young London doctor, Edward

in A roaif VC UP * handsome P ractice as a physician on Harley Street
m the 1930s to take to the woods and fields in search of a better cure

health^ °! h T" bCingS Uke Paracelsus who sought to restore
aralth by natural means so that it would not be necessary for the sick

tet to recover from their ailment and then have to recover from the

e, Bach rebelled aga.nst the idea that medicine should be painful and

Peasant. Noting that in most hospitals in England the soiled

gave ; he Padent «"* Pa'" and often did him more harm than

be h ’ V? S determined to find remedies in nature that would neither
armful nor unpleasant. He sought a remedy that would be gentle,
«■*, and would result in healing of both mind and body.

1 e aracelsus and Goethe, Bach was convinced that true knowledge

Dowsing Plants for Health 307

was to be gained not through man’s intellect, but through his ability to
see and accept the natural, simple truths of life. Paracelsus had asserted
that the further you search the greater you will realize the simplicity of
all creation, and advised physicians to search within themselves for the
spiritual insight that would lead them to sense and recognize the ener¬
gies of plants.

In the summer of 1930 Bach turned the key on his lucrative practice
and took to the highway, wandering through the English countryside
and into the wild mountains of Wales in search of the wildflowers he
was convinced contained the secret to healing both the spiritual and
physical ailments of aberrant mankind. Like Paracelsus he was con¬
vinced that disease of the body is due not primarily to physical causes,
but to disturbing moods or states of mind which interfere with the
normal happiness of the individual, moods which if allowed to continue
lead to a disturbance of the functions of the bodily organs and tissues
with resulting ill health.

With Paracelsus, Bach believed that everything that lives radiates,
and with Simoneton, he realized that plants with high vibrations were
able to raise the lowered vibrations of human beings. As he put it,
“herbal remedies have the power to elevate our vibrations, and thus draw
down spiritual power, which cleanses mind and body, and heals. Bach
compared his remedies to that of beautiful music or arrangements of
color, or any gloriously uplifting medium that gives inspiration; his cure
was not to attack the disease, but to flood the body with beautiful
vibrations from wild herbs and flowers, in the presence of which “disease
would melt away as snow in the sunshine.”

Myrna I. Lewis, coauthor with Robert N. Butler, M.D., of a new
book, Aging and Mental Health, was amazed when recently taken by
the Soviets on a visit to several sanitariums in the Black Sea city of Sochi
to find aging Soviet citizens, afflicted with a variety of ills, both physical
and mental, being treated not with drugs but with vibrations from
flowers in greenhouses where they were led to smell specific blooms so
many minutes a day. They were also being treated with music played
in their rooms and the sound of the sea recorded on tapes.

Fundamentally, Bach maintains that it is up to the sick person to

308 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

change his mind about his own illness, but that healthy aesthetic vibra-

tions help him recover his desire to be well. Bach felt that a long bout

of fear or worry could deplete an individual's vitality to the point where

his body lost its natural resistance to disease, and was thus in a state to

become the prey of any infection and any form of illness. “It is not the

disease which needs the treatment,” said Bach. "There are no diseases;
only sick people.”

Although he was convinced that plants with the right medical proper¬
ties were to be found among the simple wildflowers of the countryside,
Bach was out to find those with the greatest power, capable of being
more than palliatives, actually able to restore health to mind and body.

The first flower he tested for its medicinal properties was the yellow-

spired agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria), a common wildflower which

grows in abundance on the grassy verges of country roads and fields

throughout England. Its small blooms are golden with many stamens of

the same hue. Bach found an infusion of it to be a great remedy for

worry, for the restless tormented state of mind so often hidden behind

outward cheerfulness. Next he experimented with the striking blue

flower of chicory, which he found a remedy for overconcern, especially

for others, and discovered that it brought calmness and serenity. Bach’s

remedy for extreme fear was the administration of a dose of the elixir

of rockrose. As his discoveries and ministrations progressed, Bach felt he

was on the verge of discovering an entirely new system of medicine. On

impulse or instinct he went to the Welsh wilderness, where he found

two beautiful plants: the pale mauve impatiens, and the golden-flowered

mimulus, growing in profusion near a mountain stream. Both turned out
to be powerful medicines.

During his months in Wales, Bach felt his senses quickening, becom¬
ing more developed. Through a finely developed sense of touch he was
able to feel the vibrations and power emitted by any plant he wished
to test. Like Paracelsus, if he held a petal or bloom in the palm of his
hand or placed it on his tongue he could feel in his body the effects of
the properties within that plant. Some had a strengthening, vitalizing
ettect on his mind and body; others would give him pain, vomiting,
evers > rashes, and the like. His instinct told him that the best plants

Dowsing Plants for Health 309

would be found blooming in the middle of the year, when the days are
longest and the sun at the height of its power and strength. The plants
he chose were the most perfect of their kind, their bloom beautiful in
shape and hue, growing in profusion.

Perhaps Bach had read that Paracelsus on his estate at Hohenheim
had captured dew on plates of glass, gathering the dew under various
configurations of the heavenly bodies, believing the water to carry within
it the energy of these planetary combinations, or perhaps he had a flash
of intuition. At any rate, early one morning as he walked through a field
upon which the dew still lay heavy, it struck Bach that each dewdrop
must contain some of the properties of the plant upon which it rested;
the heat of the sun, acting through the fluid, would serve to draw out
these properties until each drop was magnetized with power. He realized
that if he could obtain the medicinal properties of the plants he was
seeking in this way, the resulting remedies would contain the full,
perfect, and uncontaminated power of the plants, and they might heal
as no medical preparations had been known to heal before. Collecting
the dew from certain flowers before the sun had caused evaporation, he
tried it on himself, shaking the drops from various flowering plants into
small bottles, filling some with the dew from flowers which had been
in full sunlight, some from those still in shade, although the latter never
seemed as potent as the ones in the sun.

Though many of the flowers did not contain the healing properties
he sought, Bach found the dew from each plant held a definite power
of some kind, and deduced that the sun’s radiation was essential to the
process of extraction. As collecting sufficient dew from individual flowers
could be laborious he decided to pick a few blooms from a chosen plant
and place them in a glass bowl filled with water from a clear stream,
leaving them standing in the field in the sunlight for several hours. To
his delight he found that the water became impregnated with the
vibrations and power of the plant and was very potent. To potentize his
water Bach would choose a summer day with no clouds to obscure the
sun's light and heat. Taking three small plain glass bowls filled with fresh
water, he set them in a field where the flowering plants were growing,
then selected the most perfect blossoms and placed them on the surface

310 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

of the water. To lift the blooms from the water without touching the

fluid with his fingers he used two blades of grass. The water was then

transferred by means of a small lipped phial to bottles. When half-full

the rest of the bottle was filled with brandy designed to preserve the

. mixture. Before the next experiment Bach would destroy both bowls and
phials.

Altogether Bach produced thirty-eight remedies and wrote a philoso¬
phic booklet to go with them. Thousands of patients throughout En-
gland and the world were to vouch for their efficacy, and many thou¬
sands still depend on this elixir of flowers to cure them of innumerable
ailments.

The work of Maurice Messegue, a sophisticated Frenchman born of
peasant stock in a remote section of Gascony known as the Gers, paral¬
lels that of Bach. Taught by his father, who took him as a child on
herb-collecting trips all over the countryside, Messegue went on to
become a famous herbal healer successfully treating hundreds of patients
including such notables as the president of the French Republic
Edouard Herriot, and artist Jean Cocteau. Among the afflictions he
cured were such baffling ones as a withered arm on a beautiful young
girl and the apparent inability to talk in a child of twelve. Most of
Messegue s cures were effected by having his patients soak their extremi¬
ties m infusions of wild plants. Hounded into court on many occasions
for practicing medicine without a medical degree, Messegue fought back
because he felt he could not abandon the thousands of sufferers who
pleaded for his assistance. An account of his life with many anecdotes
*bout his encounters with world figures appears in three best-selling
hooks he has written on the subject of plants.

. Another sensitive who can feel the radiations from flowers has gone

Bach and Messegue one better, saying he can transfer radiations direct

bom a blooming flower into a bowl of water without in any way harming
ffic plant on which it grows.

A ruddy-cheeked Scotsman, very independent, Alick Mclnnes was
hom and lives on a sheep farm in the shadow of the castle of the Thane
^ Cawdor, surrounded by gently rolling hills and a fortune in peat bog
"'“--which he cannot dig or bum because by Scottish tradition it all

Dowsing Plants for Health 311

I

belongs to the Thane, Blindfolded, Mclnnes can put his hand over a ripe
bloom and tell from the wavelength of its radiation just what plant it
is and what its medical properties may be. In India, where he spent
thirty years working for the British Raj, Mclnnes got his first introduc¬
tion to the fact that plants not only give off radiations which are sensible
to humans, but are themselves sensitive to the radiations given off by
humans; this he discovered when he visited the Bose Institute near

Calcutta.

By the entrance to the Institute stands a luxuriant Mimosa pudica.
Visitors are requested to pick a small frond from this compliant horticul¬
tural guinea pig and place it in one of Bose's complicated machines,
which provides a schematic pattern of the vibrations of the plant on a
sheet of paper. A visitor is then asked to place his wrist inside the
machine and watch as a duplicate of the pattern is produced, demon¬
strating that mimosa is so sensitive it can pick up and faultlessly reflect
individual human radiations.

As Mclnnes interprets the phenomenon of human and plant radia¬
tions, each individual member of either kingdom modifies or qualifies
with his own wavelength the fundamental energy radiating through
him. The same applies, says Mclnnes, down to the finest particle of
matter: “Everything radiates wavelengths which can be identified as
sound, color, form, movement, perfume, temperature and intelligence.”

Mclnnes says the radiations from some flowers are circular, others go
from left to right, others from right to left. Some go up and down; others
down and up; some go diagonally from left to right; others in the
opposite direction. Some feel cold; others warm. But the same flower
species always gives off the same radiation. Mclnnes says he has found
it possible to transfer flower radiations to water, where the radiations will
stay more or less indefinitely. He has some bottles with radiations still
effective after twenty years. Each flower species has a time when its
radiations can best be transferred to water, usually, though not always,
when the flowers are at the peak of their maturity, which is also usually

near a full moon.

Potencies, as Mclnnes calls the radiations which are transferred to
water, can be taken from the rose around midsummer, or June 21, an

312 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

f from the dandelion around the Easter full moon. When conditions are
right, transfer of the radiations is instantaneous, and Mclnnes, wrinkling
his weatherbeaten lips into a wise smile, says the water can actually be
seen to change, “an awe-inspiring experience never to be forgotten." Far
from damaging the plant, Mclnnes says that just at that moment when
its potency is transferred to water, other members of the same species
for miles around brighten up and appear to grow more vigorously than
before. The resulting potentized water Mclnnes calls an Exultation of
Flowers, which he says is not a specific for the treatment of any diagnosa-
ble disease, but operates in a subtle way on the radiations coming
through the human body, on animal or the soil, and in so doing raises
the vitality of the person, animal, or soil concerned. When vitality is
raised to the necessary level, says Mclnnes, illness disappears.

Mclnnes prescribes his Exultation to be taken by mouth, so many
drops at a time for varying conditions, as a salve for cuts and burns and
other problems of the skin, and as a tonic diluted in one’s bath. He says
that although he has been asked to do so he has never attempted to find
individual flowers, or groups, that would be helpful in the treatment of
a particular disease. He figures it more worthwhile to work on the
concept that all illness has a common cause, and strives for a preparation
that will, ultimately, bring results to every illness, no matter what the
diagnosis. The decision as to whether potencies from any particular
flower should be included in the forty-odd varieties in his Exultation has
been made by Mclnnes by feeling the radiations emanating from the
particular potency concerned. He finds that not all can be mixed success¬
fully. Some seem to cancel each other out; others disturb the mixture;
others upset the temper of the radiations already in the preparation.

Mclnnes is amazed at how many differing radiations he has managed
to combine in a harmonious whole.

As the radiations in Exultation of Flowers are not identifiable by
ordinary methods of analysis based on the identification of chemical
mgredients, and as so far the impulses cannot be identified by any
measuring instrument available in Britain, Mclnnes has been obliged by
^ court action instituted by the Scottish health authorities to label his
oottles “Guaranteed Chemical Composition—100% water, without

Dowsing Plants for Health 313

herbal or chemical ingredients/’ Pointing out that magnetized steel and
ordinary steel show the same chemical ingredients but are obviously
quite different from each other, Mclnnes still hopes some new method
will be devised to identify the radiations.

Mclnnes says his Exultation is just as good for a cow with milk fever
in Scotland as it is for a man with asthma in California or a woman stung
by a wasp in New Zealand. It can be used on a baby with a stomach
ache, on a hive of bees with "foul brood,” on strawberry plants with
"June yellows” or on hens which have eaten poisoned grain. Sprayed
onto the soil Mclnnes says it increases the activity and quality of soil
bacteria. But he warns that gardens which have been treated with
chemical fertilizers will take longer to respond "because the whole
polarity of the soil has been geared to decay.” He says the vibrations of
his Exultation channel fresh energy into the soil which counteracts
disease, blight, and pests.

In the more than sixteen years since Exultation of Flowers was first
offered to the public, many thousands of letters have been received
reporting success in the treatment of pretty well every diagnosable
disease. Philosophically Mclnnes believes that all forms of life are
created to live in harmony, but mankind has so misused this dominion
over created things that there is now disharmony everywhere, which is
expressed in physical disease in human, animal, and plant life, the life
forces coming from the Source of Creation becoming more and more
distorted. Believing that in the Golden Age the lion would lie down with
the lamb, he describes how, when he lived in Uganda, he would watch
hundreds of animals making tracks through the elephant grass toward
the salt licks, with carnivores such as leopards and panthers trotting
alongside tiny timorous deer that in other circumstances would tremble
and run away.

In South India, where Mclnnes spent a couple of weeks as the guest
of Ramana Mohan Maharshi at his ashram at the foot of the holy hill
Arunachalam, famed in Hindu mythology for many centuries, every
evening when the Maharshi would go out for a walk, within seconds of
his crossing the threshold of his residence, cattle tied up in stalls in the
nearby village, about half a mile away, would struggle to get out of their

314 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

fconds. Released by the villagers they careered along the road to accom¬
pany the old man on his walk, followed by all the dogs and children of
the village.

Before the procession had gone very far wild animals, says Mclnnes,
joined it from the jungle, including several varieties of snakes. Thou¬
sands of birds appeared, almost blotting out the sky, including tiny tits,
huge kites and other birds of prey, heavy-winged vultures, all flying in
harmony around the Maharshi on his walk. When he returned to his
room, said Mclnnes, all the birds, animals, and children would quietly
disappear. To achieve such an atmosphere worldwide, Mclnnes realizes
would be quite a feat. His Exultation would have to help produce
vegetation of such an improved nutritive quality that the lion could feed
on it before he would happily lie down with the lamb. Mclnnes sees no

reason such a food plant could not be encouraged by some new Burbank
to grow in abundance.

There will also have to be an increase in the sensitivity of humanity

says Mclnnes, to the point where the sacrifice of animals to sport

becomes wholly intolerable, as well as the mass slaughter of animals in

total terror in abattoirs. Better food must be more easily obtainable in

such abundance that half-starved and semi-brutalized men no longer

need to eat meat or demand work of half-dead, diseased, and suffering

animals; in other words, we must cease to be a planet of jailors and
chain-gang drivers.

As everything created is interdependent, says Mclnnes, it follows that

what affects one form of life must affect all other forms as well. "If we

deliberately cause suffering and disease in other lives, we increase our

own suffering and disease.” All creation, says Mclnnes, is affected by the

disease inflicted on laboratory animals in what he believes to be a futile

and foredoomed attempt to combat illness. All creation is tormented

through the ghastly agonies which the vivisectionist inflicts on helpless

creatures. Any relief of illness supposed to be removed by knowledge

gamed at the expense of such agonies will, says Mclnnes, be paid for

diany times over in increased suffering in some other part of the Whole.

creation suffers when plants in their millions are burnt by chemical
*eed killers.

Dowsing Plants for Health 315

Just as every created thing takes a knock for every victim of war o r
every inmate tortured in a concentration camp, so every created thing
takes a knock when a rabbit dies of human-induced myxomatosis, or a
plant dies in agony, deliberately diseased with toxic chemicals. “All of
life/' says Mclnnes, “is one. There is no exception.”

516 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 19

Radionic Pesticides

Simoneton's dream that doctors with earphones would one day diagnose
patients simply by tuning in to the frequencies given off by their ailing
organs and then be able to cure them by broadcasting to the organs more
healthful vibrations has turned out to be closer to fact than fiction.
However, because the mechanism appears to be as explosive as TNT and
as amenable to the spread of death and disease as it is to the spread of
life, the findings have been discreetly scotched by both the political and
scientific establishments.

At the end of the nineteenth centuiy Dr. Albert Abrams, the son of
a successful San Francisco merchant from whom he had inherited a vast

fortune, traveled to Heidelberg to study advanced medicine. In Naples
young Abrams watched the famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso flick a
wine glass with his finger to produce a pure tone, then step back and
by singing the same note shatter the glass. This impressive feat awoke
in Abrams the idea that he might have stumbled on a fundamental
principle which could be tied into medical diagnosis and healing.

At the University of Heidelberg’s medical school, from which he was
to receive top honors and the gold medal, Abrams met a Professor de
Sauer, who was engaged—many years before Gurwitsch had happened
on “mitogenetic radiation”—in a bizarre series of experiments with
plants. De Sauer told Abrams that, while transplanting onion seedlings,
he had inadvertently left some of the uprooted onions next to those still
growing in one of several flats. Two days later he noticed that the
seedlings growing on the side of the flat next to the dying plants were
different in appearance from those on the opposite side, De Sauer could
not explain the reason for the difference but Abrams was convinced that
the onion roots were emitting some strange form of radiation and linked
this in his mind with the resonance phenomenon behind Caruso’s voice-
shattered glass.

Abrams returned to the United States to teach pathology at Stanford
University’s medical school, of which he was later to become director
of medical studies. A superb diagnostician and master of the art of
percussion, he would tap the body of a patient to produce resonating
sounds, which became clues to whatever ills might be afflicting the
patient. One day Abrams noticed that when a nearby X-ray apparatus
was switched on without warning it dulled the resonant note he was
getting from his tapping. Perplexed, Abrams rotated his patient and
discovered that the strange dulling occurred only while the man faced
east and west, but that when he was aligned north and south the
percussion note was continuously resonant. There seemed to be a rela¬
tionship between the geomagnetic field and—as with the grains re¬
searched by Pittman in Alberta—the electromagnetic fields of individu¬
als. Abrams later discovered a similar effect was produced by a man with
a cancerous ulcer of the lip, even when the X-ray machine was not
operating,

318 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

After several months of experimentation with persons afflicted with
various maladies, Abrams concluded that nerve fibers in the epigastric
region not only react by contracting to the stimulus of X-rays generated
from a machine several yards distant, but appear to be in a state of
permanent contraction in the case of a patient suffering from cancer,
except when the patient is oriented in a north-south direction. Because
of this similarity, Abrams concluded that the contractions, due in the
first case to radiant energy rippling from an X-ray instrument, were in
the second case taking place in response to vibrating molecules which
were collectively forming the cancerous growth.

Abrams asked his houseboy, Ivor, who had accompanied him to class,
to step onto the lecture platform, strip to the waist, and face west. As
he tapped the boy just above the navel, Abrams told his students to listen
carefully to the hollow, resonant quality of the note he was obtaining
He then asked one young doctor to hold a specimen of cancerous tissue
m light contact with Ivor’s forehead, applying it for a few seconds,
removing it, and applying it again. As Abrams continuously percussed
the abdomen, the class was amazed to hear the note change from
resonance to dullness each time the specimen was placed on Ivor’s
forehead, apparently because of a contraction of muscle fibers. When
Abrams substituted a tuberculous specimen for the cancerous one, the
resonance of the note did not change. But when he began tapping an
area just below the navel, the same effect was produced. Abrams was
forced to the conclusion that unknown waves from diseased specimens
could be received and recorded by a healthy human body and that they
somehow altered the character of its tissues.

After months of work, Abrams was able to show that a series of what
he called “electronic reactions,” varying from cancerous and tuberculer
lo malarial and streptococcal, could be pinpointed on different areas of
tte trunk of a healthy person like Ivor. This led him to proclaim that
me time-honored idea that disease was of cellular origin was out of date
, must be discarded. Instead, he maintained it was because the
Moecular constituents of cells undergo a structural alteration, specifi-

th y a Ch3nge m tlle number anc * arrangement of their electrons, that
evelop characteristics which only later become visible at the mi-

Radionic Pesticides 319

croscope. Exactly what caused the alteration Abrams did not know, nor
does anyone today. He nevertheless suspected that forces could be
discovered for correcting what he considered to be intramolecular aber¬
rations, and even for preventing their occurrence.

Abrams next found that the radiation from a pathological specimen
could be transmitted, like electricity, over a six-foot wire. When a
skeptical doctor challenged Abrams to find the exact location of a
tuberculosis infection in his lung for which he had been receiving treat¬
ment in a sanitarium, Abrams immediately had the man hold one disc
against his forehead and got another student to pass the second disc over
the subject’s chest until the percussing note changed in tone, The
baffled man admitted Abrams had located the infection within centime¬
ters.

Since one spot on the trunk of a healthy subject reacted to not just
one but several pathological specimens, Abrams next began to conceive
of an instrument which might differentiate between the wavelengths of
all specifically diseased tissues. After months of research, he worked out
what he called a “reflexophone,” an instrument very much like the
rheostat—a continuously variable electrical resistor used to regulate cur¬
rent—that could emit sounds varying in pitch and thus obviate the
necessity of having to tap a specific point on a body.

Different diseases could now be read from the dial: 55 for a syphilitic
specimen, 58 for sarcomatous tissue, and so on. Abrams asked his assis¬
tant to mix up the specimens and found he could infallibly select or
“diagnose,” by checking the readings on his indicator.

Abrams’ developments to this point ran not only decades ahead of,
but directly counter to, the prevailing medical philosophy of his day. His
statement that “as physicians we dare not stand aloof from the progress
made in physical science and segregate the human entity from other
entities of the physical universe” was as incomprehensible to most of his
medical colleagues as were the later pronouncements of Lakhovsky and
Crile.

An even more fantastic revelation came when Abrams found he could
diagnose the ills of the human body with his instrument from a single
drop of the body’s blood. Furthermore, by apparently inducting the

320 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

effect from one reflexophone to another which contained three rheostats
calibrated in units of 10,1 and 1/25, he was able to determine not only

from what disease a person was suffering but to what stage it had
advanced.

Even more fantastic, Abrams found that if a woman was afflicted with
a breast cancer, he could determine from her blood spot alone in which
breast the cancer was located, merely by having a healthy percussed
subject point with his fingertips to his own breasts. In exactly the same
way, Abrams could reveal the exact site of tubercular or any other
diseased condition whether focused in the lungs, bowel, bladder, one of
the vertebrae; in fact, wherever in the body.

One day while Abrams was demonstrating to a class the reaction
induced by the blood of a malarial patient, he suddenly turned and said.
Well, there are upwards of forty of you physicians present, and proba¬
bly all of you would prescribe quinine to a patient suffering from this
disease, but can any one of you offer any scientific reason for so doing?”
There being no reply, Abrams took out a few grains of sulfate of quinine
and put them where the blood drop had been in the device. It produced
exactly the same percussion note as malaria. He then placed the malarial
material in the container together with a grain or so of quinine wrapped
in tissue paper. Now the percussion which had produced a dull sound
indicating malaria gave a resonant sound. To his amazed class Abrams

frui. ivivyniu HIV/

uwl iduiduuns emitted oy quinine

exactly canceled those from malarial molecules, that the effect on ma¬
laria of quinine was due to an unsuspected electrical law which should
become the subject of intensive research. Various other known antidotes
behaved similarly—mercury against syphilis, to cite but one example.

Abrams knew that if he could devise a wave-emitting instrument,
similar to a wireless broadcasting station, which could alter the character
of the waves transmitted by malarial or syphilitic tissue, he might cancel
them out as effectively as did quinine or mercury.

Though at first he believed “this was beyond the wit of man,” he
eventually built an “oscilloclast” with the help of a friend, Samuel O.
Hoffman, a distinguished radio research engineer who had achieved
fame in World War I by devising a unique method for detecting Ger-

Radionic Pesticides 321

man zeppelins approaching the U.S. coast even at a great distance. This
oscilloclast or “wave breaker" could emit specific waves capable of cur¬
ing human afflictions by apparently altering or canceling out radiations
emitted by various diseases. By 1919 Abrams began teaching its use to
physicians, who, because neither they nor Abrams could exactly explain
how it effected cures, regarded it as nothing short of miraculous.

In 1922, Abrams reported in the Physico-Clinical Journal that for the
first time he had effected over, telephone wires the diagnosis of a patient
miles away from his office, using nothing more than a drop of blood from
the patient and analysis of its vibratory rates by his instruments. This
somewhat eerie claim finally aroused the ire of the AMA, which pub¬
lished a defamatory article impugning Abrams in its journal as a quack,
an article which was parroted in England in the British Medical Journal
This caused Sir James Barr, past president of the British Medical Associ¬
ation, who had been successfully using Abrams' methods in his own
practice, to write in reply: “You very seldom quote from the Journal of
the American Medical Association and one might have expected that
when you did you would have chosen a more serious subject than an
ignorant tirade against an eminent medical man, against, in my opinion,
the greatest genius in the medical profession." Barr concluded that one
day “medical editors and medical men will begin to perceive that there
was more to Abrams' vibrations than was dreamt of in their philosophy.”

Abrams' greatest discoveries were that all matter is radioactive and
that the generated waves can be picked up across space by using human
reflexes as detectors; also, that in many conditions of disease dull patches
are consistently found at specific spots on afflicted patients’ bodies,

When Abrams died in 1924, the vilification against him continued
in the United States in eighteen separate and consecutive issues or
Scientific American. One of the worst insinuations was that the
“Abrams box" had been devised for no other purpose than to make a
financial killing by selling it to naive physicians and an unsuspecting
public. No one noted that Abrams, a millionaire in his own right, had
written to Upton Sinclair, one of his American defenders, that he would
donate his devices to, and work unremunerated for, any institute which
would develop the “Abrams box" in the interests of humanity.

322 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

The sanctions against Abrams and his work scared off all but a small
minority of American doctors, most of whom were independent-minded
-chiropractors or, as they like to be called, “drugless physicians.”

But a generation after Abrams' death one of these, living in the San
Francisco Bay area, was visited by Curtis P. Upton, a Princeton-trained
civil engineer whose father was a partner of Thomas Alva Edison.
Upton's engineering mind led him to wonder whether the strange de¬
vice used to cure human affliction might not be applied to pest control
for agriculture. In the summer of 1951 he and his Princeton classmate
William J. Knuth, an electronics expert from Corpus Christi, Texas,
drove into the cotton fields of the thirty-thousand-acre Cortaro-Marana
tract near Tucson, Arizona. Together they unloaded from the back of
their truck a mysterious boxlike instrument about the size of a portable
radio, complete with dials and a stick antenna. Only this time they went
one better than Simoneton and Mclnnes. They would attempt to affect
the field not directly but through the medium of photographs.

An aerial photograph of the field was placed on a “collector plate"
attached to the base of the instrument, together with a reagent known
to be poisonous to cotton pests. The dials were set in a specific manner.
The object of the exercise was to clear the field of pests without recourse
to chemical insecticides. The theory behind the system—as “way out”
as anything so far reported on the nature of plants—held that the
molecular and atomic makeup of the emulsion on the photograph would
be resonating at the identical frequencies of the objects they represented
pictorially. Though the American engineers did not know it, the same
discovery had been made by Bovis in the 1930s. By affecting the photo¬
graph with a reagent known to be poisonous to cotton pests the Ameri¬
cans believed the cotton plants »n the field could be immunized against
the pests, Because the amount of poisonous reagent used was infinitesi¬
mal compared to the number of acres photographed, the reagent was
thought to act in the same way that trace dosages of dilution function
l n Homeopathic Medicine.

Homeopathy is a method of treatment founded by Christian Samuel
Hahnemann, a physician of note bom in Meissen in Saxony in 1755.
Hahnemann, who was also a chemist, a linguist, a translator of medical

Radionic Pesticides 323

\

s

works, and the author of a comprehensive apothecaries' lexicon, got
himself into serious trouble with the then equivalent of the FDA by his
discovery that small doses of what can cause the symptoms of a disease
in human beings can also cure them. The original discovery was made
by chance when the Countess of Cinchon, wife of the Spanish Viceroy
to Peru, was relieved of malaria with an infusion of bark from a local
tree which produced symptoms in her identical with those of malaria.
Thereafter known as "cinchon bark,” the remedy was sold by monks in
Spain to the rich for its weight in gold and given to the poor for nothing.

Spurred by this novel approach to medicine, Hahnemann made a
methodical search for plants, herbs, barks, or any substance, including
snake venom, which could produce symptoms similar to those of a
known disease, and by administering them in small doses produced some
near miracle cures. He found belladonna to be a remedy against scarlet
fever, pulsatilla against measles, and gelsemium against influenza. Quite
as extraordinary as Hahnemann’s cures was his next discovery, that the
more he diluted a remedy the more potent and effective it became, even
if diluted to an infinitesimal one million to one. Rudolf Hauschka
explains the phenomenon by suggesting that if matter is a condensation
or a crystallization of cosmic forces, these forces would naturally revert
to being more powerful as they were liberated from their material casing
like jinns from a bottle.

A careful chemist, Hahnemann would start by diluting the tincture
of some bark, root, resin, seed, or gum with ninety-nine parts of pure
alcohol. This would give him what he called a one-centesimal potency.
He would then dilute one part of this liquid into ninety-nine parts of
a diluent. The third time round he would have a tincture that was only
one millionth part of the diluent. The result, for some even to him
mysterious reason, was far more potent. Hauschka explains part of
Hahnemann’s secret as being in the rhythmic, mathematical fashion in
which he shook his dilutions, rhythm having the same effect it has on
humans of freeing the spirit from the clutches of the body.

But the authorities made short shrift of Hahnemann. Already in bad
odor with his fellow physicians because he considered bleeding and
cupping his patients to be a crime, Hahnemann next incurred the wrath

324 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

^his fellow apothecaries when they saw the threat to their profits from
{|ie sale of drugs in such minute quantities. The moment Hahnemann’s
discovery was given to the public in the journal of Goethe’s personal
physician, Dr. Hufeland, the Guild of Apothecaries (forerunners of
t6day s pharmacists and the "detail men” who each year press hundreds
ofnew pills on doctors) saw to it that Hahnemann was brought before
a'court, found guilty, forbidden to dispense medicine, and compelled to
leave town.

In Tucson in 1951, it would have been hard to find a scientist who
would bet the small change in his pocket that Upton and Knuth’s
protective process could offer them any safeguards against marauding
pests. Yet the two engineers pursued their course, repeating the process
\rith aerial photographs covering the entire four thousand acres owned
by the Cortaro Management Company, one of Arizona's biggest cotton
growers. The company executives were gambling that, if the twelve
varieties of pests that normally attacked their million-dollar crop could
be kept at bay with so simple a device, they could save up to $30,000
a year in operating costs by eliminating the use of insecticide sprays,

> In the fall, the Tucson Weekend-Reporter ran an illustrated two-page
spread headlined: "Million Dollar Gamble Pays Off for Cotton Man.”
Hie article stated that a “Buck Rogers type of electronic pest control”
had allowed Cortaro to achieve an almost 25 percent increase in per-acre
yield of cotton over the state average. W. S. Nichols, president of the
Cortaro Management Company, stated in an affidavit that the treated
cotton also seemed to have approximately 20 percent more seed: “This
may possibly be the result of not destroying the bees, upon which the
wdionic process seems to have no effect.” Nichols further remarked that
his hoe hand$ had noted an almost complete absence of snakes in the
areas subjected to the strange treatment.

On the East Coast of the United States, one of Upton’s Princeton
classmates, Howard Armstrong, who had become an industrial chemist
with many inventions to his credit, decided to try his friend’s method
m Pennsylvania. After taking an aerial photograph of a cornfield under
attack by Japanese beetles, he cut one corner off the photo with a pair

scissors and laid the remainder together with a small amount of

Radionic Pesticides 325

rotenone, a beetle poison, extracted from the roots of a woody Asian vine
which the Japanese call “roten,” on the collector plate of one of Upton's
radionic devices.

After several five- to ten-minute treatments with the machine’s dials
set to specific readings, a meticulous count of beetles revealed that
80-90 percent of them had died or disappeared from the corn plants
treated through the photo. The untreated plants in the corner cut away
from the photo remained 100 percent infested.

After witnessing this experiment, B. A. Rockwell, director of research
for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau Cooperative Association in Harris¬
burg, wrote: “To control insect pests at a distance of thirty miles with
no danger to man, plants or animals would perhaps be an accomplish¬
ment heretofore unrivaled in the scientific control of insects injurious
to vegetation. To an individual with 19 years experience in the research
field this feat appeared unreal, impossible, fantastic, and crazy. Yet
careful counts by the writer of the treated corn plants and untreated
corn plants indicated definitely that the kill ratio was 10 to 1 in favor
of the treated plants.”

Upton, Knuth, and Armstrong combined their talents and the first
letters of their names to form UKACO, Inc. The new company’s goal
was to relieve farmers of unwanted pests by the new method, as scientifi¬
cally inexplicable as it was simple and inexpensive. The company re¬
ceived the backing of General Henry M. Gross, one of Harrisburg’s most
distinguished citizens, head of the Selective Service Board for the State
of Pennsylvania.

In the.West, Upton and Knuth contracted with forty-four artichoke
growers to treat their crop against plume moths. The contracts were
written on the basis of “no control—no pay.” All the growers paid the
service charge of one dollar an acre, a tiny fraction of the costs or
conventional spraying. In Pennsylvania Rockwell stated: “Since farmers
usually do not pay for a service unless there is value received, this is the
best testimonial for the UKACO process which has come to my atten¬
tion.”

Convinced that a radical new development for controlling pests was
in the offing, Rockwell arranged contracts with his fellow farmers to run

326 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

a long series of experiments under his supervision. In 1949 at the

cooperatives Camp Potato” in Potter County, and at the Fairview

farmstead in Easton, potato crops treated by the UKACO process

yielded 30 percent more than those fields sprayed seven times with

conventional insecticides, the saving in chemicals also greatly adding to
the value of the crop.

The following year the Farm Bureau's research division operatives
having learned to operate the UKACO equipment themselves, got
yields 22 percent greater than in the insecticide-treated fields. In tests
at Hershey Estates Farm No. 40, and the bureau’s own poultry farm,
a pair of cornfields showed, by actual count of cornstalks, 65 percent
control of second-brood European corn borer, an efficiency never ap¬
proached with any other treatment.

In Eatonville, Florida, the director of agriculture for the Hungerford

School for Boys, a graduate in agriculture from Tallahassee University,

also successfully used the UKACO method to eliminate pestilent worms

from the school s cabbage patch and flea beetles from its turnip plants.

At this point, the new insecticideless method of treating crops piqued

the curiosity of the United States Department of Agriculture’s research

station at Beltsville, Maryland, one of whose officials, Dr. Truman Hien-

ton, called General Gross to say that he would like to find out exactly

how UKACO was achieving its results. When Hienton and iwo of his

Ph.D. colleagues arrived in Harrisburg, they were informed that the

principle behind the machine seemed somehow to be related to that of

radio broadcasting. But when UKACO’s Howard Armstrong was asked

at what wavelength he was broadcasting his treatments, he could only

say he did not know. The mystified scientists shook their heads dubiously
and returned to Beltsville.

In the summer of 1951 Armstrong traveled through the Cumberland
a ey treating corn and anything else the farmers wanted him to treat.
He was so successful that when insecticide salesmen visited the farms
under treatment they were informed their products were no longer
needed. The farmers themselves operated many of the treating devices
*hich were left by Armstrong on their farms. This evidently raised the
nackles of the American insecticide industry, which responded that

Radionic Pesticides 327

winter to UKACO’s new technology in the same way that the British
fertilizer industry had to Sir Albert Howard's recommendations.
Agricultural Chemicals, the industry’s mouthpiece, printed an article in
its January, 1952, issue, panning the UKACO process as fraudulent.
When asked about the article’s claim that his test results could not be
duplicated by “disinterested agencies,” the Pennsylvania farm bureau’s
Rockwell replied: “I've studied enough science to know a dead Japanese
beetle when I see one.”

In March of 1952, fifty York County agricultural leaders assembled,
with a skeptical glint in their eyes, to hear R. M. Benjamin, executive
secretary of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, tell them during a two-hour
meeting how they could kill or chase away various insect pests by what
seemed to be remote electronic control. Benjamin supplied testimonials
to back up his story, one of them signed by the Secretary of Agriculture
for Pennsylvania, Miles Horst, who reported highly effective results on
a rose-of-Sharon bush in his garden which had been infested by Japanese
beetles. Though many in the audience at first heckled Benjamin, and
one jeeringly remarked that perhaps the cornfields should be injected
with “a dose of faith,” before the end of the meeting all present became
convinced that the new methods should be given a trial the following
summer.

When the York Dispatch , which had printed an account of the
meeting, requested an opinion on the UKACO process from the U S.
Department of Agriculture in Washington, it was surprised to learn that
the department put no faith in the process. F. C. Bishopp, assistant chief
of the Agricultural Research Administration’s Bureau of Entomology
and Plant Quarantine, claimed in a letter that one of the bureau’s field
men had observed the experiments run by Knuth and Upton in the
Southwest and found that the insects were not controlled. Bishopp
added that “though we have not had an opportunity to carefully exam¬
ine the device, or conduct any properly designed tests of it... a number
of adverse reports on tests set up by the company have also reached us.
He cited an article in the Arizona Farmer headlined “Electronic De-
Bugger Flops—Promoter of Magic Black Box Leaves Texas Panhandle
When Cotton Farmers Find It Didn’t Work.”

528 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

A week later, Bishopp, realizing that tests planned for the summer of
,1952 were to proceed as scheduled and, evidently feeling that he had
not made his point convincingly, wrote a second letter to the York
Dispatch, in which he stated in part: “From our limited knowledge of
the use of radiation in control of insects we frankly feel that the claims
of this company are exaggerated. The question naturally arises as to why
the company should proceed with large-scale tests without having
competent authorities evaluate the method. We are anxious that un¬
sound methods not be permitted to divert the farmer’s attention, at this
critical time, from recognized sound insect control practices.” Bishopp’s
aim was evidently to use his authoritative position to prejudge and
condemn a process of which he admitted he had no firsthand knowledge,

Rockwell never denied that the radionic process was not always suc¬
cessful. He himself stated plainly to the newspaper that certain tests
could fail because of interference from standing irrigation pipes, high-
tension wires, leaky transformers, wire fences, radar, plant pots, and
various soil conditions, and added that, because the patents for UKACO
devices had not yet been granted, he was not at liberty to turn one over
to the Beltsville research center.

The same spring, the three UKACO partners and General Gross
organized a nonprofit foundation to carry on their pest-control work.

\ Because of the homeopathic quality of the reagents used, the nonprofit
entity was called the Horneotronic Foundation, at the suggestion of Dr.

: ^William J. Hale, former chief of research in organic chemistry for the
Dow Chemical Corporation.

In the meantime, despite Bishopp’s statements, the USDA’s Dr.
Hienton again called General Gross to say that he had heard extremely
favorable reports on Armstrong’s work in the Cumberland Valley the
previous year and wondered what his Beltsville agricultural research
station could do to assist UKACO’s further efforts. Gross suggested that
the government research body send five representatives to work all,
summer with five UKACO operatives, each one of whom was to treat
fields in a separate Pennsylvania county. By constant observation of the
method of treatment and results obtained, they should be able to deter¬
mine firsthand whether the UKACO work was all that it claimed to be.

Radionic Pesticides 329

Instead of accepting Gross's offer, Hienton decided to commission a
USDA field worker in New Jersey, Dr. E. W. Seigler, and an assistant
to oversee the UKACO operations on a sporadic basis.

During the 1952 growing season field corn was treated on 1,420 acres
belonging to 61 farmers on 81 separate holdings in five counties; 78,360
individual corn stalks were examined. Officers of the new Homeotronic
Foundation worked with several Pennsylvania Farm Bureau officials and
one from the Farm Bureau Association of the State of Ohio.

The USDA officials finally put in an appearance on August 7. Dr.
Seigler randomly selected one cornfield in York County owned by the
Bittinger Cannery and checked the treated corn against the untreated.
In four rows totaling 400 plants he found 346 silks damaged by beetles
in the untreated section but only 6 5 silks damaged in the treated section.
In another field, owned by the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau poultry farm
cooperative, results were 339 and 64. Checks in other areas also testified
to the success of the new methods, with the exception of one field where
the process inexplicably did not seem to work. Overall results indicated
that 92 percent success in the control of Japanese beetles, and 58
percent for corn borers was achieved.

The UKACO team was happy that the results had now been checked
by the United States agricultural authorities. But the USDA's Dr. Sei¬
gler asked UKACO to refrain from publishing any results in the Pennsyl¬
vania Farm Bureau Journal until Beltsville had had time to issue their
own report. When, after a number of weeks, no report was forthcoming
from the USDA research station. General Gross called Beltsville to ask
for thirty copies. Instead of mailing them, Bishopp sent a curt letter to
Rockwell stating that, since no count had been made before the treat¬
ment had begun, the reports sent back from Pennsylvania by his own
research men were valueless.

As the Pennsylvanians knew that Beltsville was well aware that the
pictures had been taken and treatment started long before there was any
appearance of either corn ears or Japanese beetles, they found the
attitude of the USDA surprising. It seemed that the USDA was intent
on killing the UKACO process in the bud. When several very large
prospective customers called Beltsville for an opinion about it, they were

330 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

.informed that the whole thing was a fake that had produced no results
whatsoever.

Armstrong next learned from the West Coast that representatives of
insecticide companies in concert with USDA employees had been visit¬
ing farmers who used the UKACO process and telling them it was an
outright fraud. The UKACO team came to the conclusion that Belts-
ville was directly and intentionally preventing them from proceeding
with their work and that lobbyists of the insecticide industry in Wash¬
ington were putting extreme pressure on the government to stamp out
the new pest-control methods which were so dangerously threatening to
put them out of business. So effective was the campaign that UKACO
;had difficulty soliciting new clients among farmers, who were becoming

convinced by an army of USDA agents that there was nothing to the
Upton-Knuth-Armstrong treatments.

w Meanwhile Upton, whose patent application had been rejected for
“lack of convincing evidence in the record from qualified experts with
scientific backgrounds," submitted a twenty-two-page addendum to sup¬
port his claim. The addendum pleaded that “it is difficult to precisely
define the nature and mechanism of the novel methods" and postulated
that the process comprehends the study and use of certain fundamental
energy sources capable of affecting molecules, atoms and electrons
through their characteristic harmonic potency resonance frequencies in
which every particle of matter exhibits its own characteristic frequency
under a controlled polarity in a magnetic field of motion."

; In support of their allegations, the inventors cited the work of Dr.
iEdward Purcell, co-winner with Dr. Felix Bloch of a 1952 Nobel Prize
in physics, who published an article in the November 15 issue of Science
News Letter on the characteristic resonant frequency of elements when
resonated in selected magnetic fields, and a report on the work of Dr.
Bloch, wherein he succeeded, by a process he designated “nuclear induc¬
tion," in turning atomic particles into what, in effect, were infinitesimal
radio transmitters, whose broadcasts, if highly amplified, could be de¬
tected in loudspeakers. There was little doubt in Upton's mind that his
radiotonic treatment,” as he called it, made use of the type of energy
involved in the Bloch study, which, as Upton wrote, had “not heretofore

Radionic Pesticides 331

been recognized by science—particularly in itsipplications to molecular
structures of the complex nature of plant am animal life."

Holding that the work of electronic expets and the detection of
potentials by means of delicate apparatus hd long since proven the
existence and the measurability of various ampltudes of electrical poten¬
tials in living creatures, Upton referred to the writings of Drs. George
Washington Crile and Harold Saxton Burr.

When all this failed to get the patent accepted, General Gross
brought into play his contacts on the boardsof some of the nation’s
largest industrial companies and was able to intoduce the process to the
consideration of important scientists in the U.S Government, including
Vannevar Bush, science adviser to President Bsenhower. When Gross
explained to therti UKACO’s accomplishment&nd said they were based
on the idea that every particle has its own geneic frequency, as Dr. Crile
had so stoutly maintained, the scientists responded heatedly that the
UKACO-obtained results were impossible.

Though Gross politely suggested that the scientists come to Harris¬
burg and talk with Rockwell and the farmer: whose crops had been
“radiotonically” protected and see the results or themselves, they de¬
clined his invitation. Gross had no more succes; with the director of the
Carnegie Institution in Washington, who Hatlytold him that there was
nothing in the science of electronics to suggest tiat the UKACO process
could work.

Dr. Willard F. Libby, who devised the carbn-14 dating technique,
and who was soon to win the Nobel Prize in hemistry, after hearing
Gross out, discouragingly yet perhaps accurate! told him that it would
take more than a million dollars to research tie “box.”

What also may have alarmed the governmeit was the idea that if a
host of insects could be affected, even killed, singly by radiating a poison
at them via a picture of the plants which they ''ere attacking, then the
same technique could be militarily applied to oncentrations of troops
or even the populations of whole cities in wartme. All this discourage-
ment, added to the studied and seemingly sucessful efforts of govern-
mental and industrial moguls to wean farmers iway from the new ap¬
proach to insect control, finally forced UKACO to close its doors. But
:he story of what came to be called “radionics’ was only beginning

B2 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

Th.rty years before the demise of the UKACO enterprise, a yorng
engmeer for the Kansas City Power and Light Company, V. Caen
Hieronymus, who was one of the first to be granted an amateur radio
^erator s hcense before World War I, was asked by one of his neijh-
bore a Dr, Planck, to machine various parts for some instrumental Li
which reqmred prec,se components, such as strips of silver plate, cut to
«act proportions down to the millimeter, and carefully wound coil
Beyond refernng to a mysterious medical genius in San Francisco wi h
whom he had Studied fantastic new techniques to treat disease, Plamk
i no enlighten his young machinist as to the purpose of the new
instruments he was helping to build. It was only after Planck died ard
wife asked Hieronymus to come to the house to look over a workroom
fun of strange equipment and, because she had no use for it selert

Ltomen^heTdt’ H “ :r0nymi,s leamed real purpose of the

sm^onwasALcrttbrs ^ ^ ^ ““ M “ ° f ^ U ” k "™

Meanwhile a vivacious young Los Angeles chiropractor, Dr, Rut,
sMn^r ,"f ng refinements Abrams’ devices. Drown’s moi
be u ed to LT iP S r ment r ^ development of 3 camera which could

fcousands of miles from her office. Even more startling, she could take
Pictures in cross-section,” which cannot be done with X-rays. Thoug
she mceived a British patent for this twenty-first-century apparatus Dr
Drown s claim was relegated by FDA authorities to the realm of sconce

t on and her equipment was confiscated in the early 1940s To make

sure that her plight was suitably publicized the same aufhn v 4 .
it thaf ri=nnrt*ro f t 'i ’ cne same authorities saw to

reporters from Life magazine were on the scene. After the Life

PreSen ‘ ed Her " 3 Charlat “’ Dr ’ Ruth died of g " _ n

unrecognized genius. 5

While Drown was working in California, still another of Abrams’

ShTan 3 ?T g ° d0C ‘ 0r ’ G ' W Wiggekworth . with the help of his
as an 0 ; t r h eC f °HK T7 r h0 at first Iooked “P° n the oscilloclast

fc " A t"" f l - ^ s

variable condensers, a change which he found vastly improved the tun-

Padionic Pesticides 333

ing. Wiggelsworth christened his new device a “pathoclast” or disease
breaker, the users of which banded together into a Pathometric Associa¬
tion.

In the 1930s Glen Wills, an Arkansas chiropractor, successful busi¬
nessman, and promoter, who pioneered the method of raising broiling
chickens in cages or “batteries,” heard Hieronymus lecture on electronic
theory before the Pathometric Association. Wills bought out Wiggel-
sworth’s Pathometric Association and asked Hieronymus if he could
build a modified and more complex version of the pathoclast.

Hieronymus had earlier made a detailed study of his own of strange
energies emitted, not from healthy or diseased tissues, but from metals.
Working on his theory, he took sterling-silver objects, such as broken
spoons, pepper-and-salt shakers, and anything else he could steal from
his wife, and buried them in the Kansas prairie.

Knowing the location of the hidden silver, Hieronymus then “worked
backward,” as he says, trying to find the emanations from it. To his
surprise, he discovered that every so often he could find no energy
emanating from the silver, and wondered if someone might have dug
up his hoard. A few hours later the energy would be radiating as strongly
as ever.

Hieronymus’ eclectic mind next wondered whether the energy was
undetectable at given times because it was radiating not upward out of
the earth but downward toward the earth’s center. To find out, he took
an eight-foot copper-clad steel ground rod and sledge-hammered it at an
angle into the ground so that it would extend below the silver hoard.
When the rod was at the level of the silver or below it, his device, to
which the rod was attached, indicated a surge of energy; when he pulled
the rod some distance above the silver, no energy was registered.

By repeatedly taking measurements over weeks, Hieronymus found
that the energy from the silver seemed to be diverted downward for a
few hours every two and a half days. Checking in an almanac he discov¬
ered that the cycle of diversions in some ways correlated with phases of
the moon. What Pfeiffer had discovered about lunar influence with
respect to plants seemed also to be applicable to metals.

Further work with buried metal also convinced Hieronymus that

334 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

these energies were, like those in Abrams' experiments, strongly in¬
fluenced by magnetic attraction. Thus, at least two twentieth-century
researchers, one a medical man, like Mesmer, the other a laboratory
researcher, like Reichenbach, appeared to have rediscovered the link

between mineral magnetism on the one hand and “animal magnetism”
on the other.

Hieronymus suspected that the unknown energy emitted from metals
might be somehow linked to sunlight; since it could be transmitted over
wires, it might have an effect on the growth of plants.

To find out, Hieronymus placed some aluminum-lined boxes in the

pitch-dark cellar of his Kansas City house. Some boxes he grounded to

a water pipe and connected by separate copper wires to metal plates on

die outside of the house exposed to full sunlight. Other boxes were left

unconnected. In all of them Hieronymus planted seed grain. In the

connected boxes the seeds grew into sturdy green plants. The seeds in

the unconnected boxes had no trace of green and were anemic and
drooping.

This brought Hieronymus to the revolutionary conclusion that what¬
ever caused the development of chlorophyll in plants could not be
sunlight itself but something associated with it, which, unlike light, was
transmittable over wires. He had no idea at what frequency this energy

might be located on the electromagnetic spectrum, or even if it was
related to it.

As Hieronymus continued to build instruments for the doctors, and
to experiment with them, he grew more and more convinced that the
energy being modulated by the devices had little to do with electromag¬
netism. This notion became a certainty when he found the device itself
was short-circuited if bathed in light rays from the sun just as electrical
circuits in a radio are shorted by being plunged into a bath of water.

Hieronymus next designed a special analyzer, first with lenses, finally
with a prism, by means of which he could identify, from the radiations
fiey emitted, many of the elements on Mendeleyev’s periodic chart. He
found that the energy, when refracted through a prism, behaved in the
«»me manner as light, except that the angles of refraction were much
Ri0re ac ute, and that the energy from various elements came through

Radionic Pesticides 335

at angles of refraction in the same order as the contents of their nuclei.
His ability to detect a substance from its radiation alone convinced
Hieronymus that disease was destroyed by the Abrams device and its
descendants “through a radiative attack on the binding energy which

holds molecular structures together.”

The frequency of emanation, or angle of refraction, is in exact propor¬
tion to the number of particles in the nucleus of an element, says
Hieronymus. The range of frequencies or angles of refraction from
complex substances can thus be used to disclose what they contain. The
energy emitted does not, like electromagnetic energy, attenuate in¬
versely as the square of the distance from its source. It radiates out only
a certain distance depending on the object from which it is emitted, on
the direction it takes, and even on the time of day of its measurement.
Something varies the amount of radiation emitted in the same way that
fog, smoke or other materials altering the density of the air in our
atmosphere vary the intensity of light from whatever source.

Trying to describe this radiation Hieronymus first came up with the
cumbersome explanation: “Energy obeying some of the laws of elec¬
tricity but not all of them, and some of the laws of optics , but not all
of them.” To obviate the repetition he finally coined the term “eloptic

energy. ”

This energy, he concluded, though independent of, was somehow
affiliated with, electromagnetic energy. Because of the difference,
Hieronymus inferred that their spectra of frequencies were necessarily
related. He decided to refer to eloptic energy in all its wavelengths as
a fine medium which, as he wrote, “might be the same as that which
used to be described by electronic engineers and physicists as 'the ether’
put in action at higher harmonics than so far experienced.”

In the early 1940s Hieronymus applied for a patent. The invention
to which he put claim was basically a method and an apparatus relating
to the art of detecting the presence of, and measuring the intensity or
quantity of, any known element of material matter, singly or in combina-
tion, whether in solid, fluid or gaseous form.” For those who might rush
to duplicate his idea, there was an important qualification in the applies
tion which stated that the “apparatus preferably relies upon the element
of touch and, therefore , the skill of the operator. ”

336 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

f -1 : f Th* s was because the operator had to stroke a detector which, sub¬
stituting for the abdomen of Abrams’ subject, was, in the abstruse
language required by the patent office: “preferably an electrical conduc¬
tor coated with a material having such characteristics that under influ-
| ence of energy flowing through the conducting portion, the coating will
| change its surface tension or viscosity, or in some manner give evidence
of the presence of the energy flowing through the conducting portion
by producing a greater drag or resistance to the movement of any part
of the body of the operators thereover, such as the hand or fingers.”

What actually happened at the detector, to increase and decrease its
drag at the touch of the operator, was not understood, but, as the text
I ^ mel y explained, “the apparatus functions . . . and, therefore, a posi¬
tively acting analyzer for atomic radiations is produced even though the
principle upon which it is based is not fully known.”

• he was invited in 1946, less than a year after Hiroshima and

Nagasaki had been blasted, to describe his new process over Kansas
Gity s radio station WHAM, Hieronymus paid full tribute to Abrams.
“About twenty years ago a discovery was made by a California man,”
he said, that was so hard to believe and more especially by those who
did not wish to believe it, that the world was set back by their disbelief
for many years. There were a few of those following along who took the
Original idea to the point where today it is as important, in fact, more
important to mankind than the atomic bomb because the latter means
destruction of humanity and the other idea means the lengthening of
Kfe and the alleviation of disease.”

^ The bacteriologist Otto Rahn, whose book on radiation from living
things had so puzzled his colleagues ten years before, after examining
Hieronymus’ process and experiments, wrote to the inventor: “Since
tee radiations hoid the secret of life, they also hold the secret of death.
M present, very few people know about the possibilities, and very few
snow all the facts. It seems imperative that those few keep their knowl-
^ge to themselves, and divulge only as much as is necessary to perform
immediate applications to cure disease. Your discoveries open up
©eat possibilities, as tremendous as those of the atom bomb, and just
$e atomic energy, these radiations may be used for the bad as well as
r the good of humanity.” In the meantime, the Saturday Evening Post

Radionic Pesticides 33 7

1

published a rehash of the more than twenty-year-old Scientific American
series in a snide article 'The ondrous Box of Dr. Abrams, authored
by a Robert M. Yoder, who falsely claimed that Abrams had risen to
“fame and fortune selling a sealed box.”

Part of the motive for this hatchet job was revealed by Hieronymus
in his answering letter to the Post’s editor, Ben Hibbs. “This is a
controversial subject” wrote Hieronymus, “only because it involves the
pocketbook of a large group of people who might be harmed financially
should the truth of the present day status of the little black box be made
generally known to the public. The unfortunate part of the situation at
the moment is that a large pressure group is still fighting tooth and nail
to keep the known facts from being presented and I just wonder if the
article in the Saturday Evening Post wasn't instigated by that group.”

The letter appeared in a booklet. The Truth about Radionics and
Some of the Criticism made about it by its Enemies , published by a group
which, because it applied the new term “Radionics” to the therapies
being practiced on the basis of Abrams' finding, called itself the Interna¬
tional Radionics Association.

In 1949 Hieronymus was awarded United States patent number
2,482,773 for the “Detection of Emanations from Materials and Mea¬
surement of the Volumes Thereof.” Other patents were later issued in

the United Kingdom and Canada.

The story of UKACO and the Homeotronic Foundation is further
complicated by the fact that, at one point during the work, Hieronymus
went to Harrisburg to consult with and assist Armstrong and his col¬
laborators. Hieronymus told the authors that the device incorporating
the amplifier which he had built for Wills was used in Pennsylvania with
almost 100 percent success. However, according to Hieronymus, the
UKACO group could not understand his notion that a new “eloptic
energy” might be involved and preferred to proceed on the theory that
the device worked solely on electromagnetic or electronic principles.

When they made further adaptations on his device, says Hieronymus,
they began to get less than perfect results. The lack of a perfect record,
however, was more than overshadowed in Hieronymus’ eyes by observa¬
tions which shook him profoundly. At the Hershey farms, together with

338 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

a UKACO representative he selected three ears of com on each of which
a com worm was munching.

Isolating the ears so that the worms could not escape, Hieronymus
began to treat them with his radionic broadcaster. He states that, after
three days of treatment for ten minutes per hour round the clock, two
of the com worms were reduced to mush but the third was still wobblily
intact. Another twenty-four hours of the same treatment and the stub¬
born worm was also mush. All that remained of the others was just “wet
places” on the corn ears.

Hieronymus was so stunned by the lethal potential of the tuned

radiation that he resolved never to reveal everything about the makeup

of his devices or their operation until he could one day find serious

researchers of impeccable character to help him elucidate the exact
potentials of his discoveries.

Having for years measured the states of the human body and its
organs radionically, Hieronymus and his wife, Louise, operator of the

device, decided m 1968 to check the ongoing conditions of the first men
ever to go on a trip to the moon.

They ordered photographs of the three astronauts from Washington

and, after inserting them one at a time in their instrument, claimed they

were not only able to track and monitor all physiological functions of

the astronauts from the earth to the moon and back, but to determine

‘that the transmitting energy could neither be shielded by the metal shell

** the capsule nor affected by the great distance from Mother Earth or

er satellite. They said they were also able to measure the effects of high

G stress on the astronauts during take-off and re-entry as well as the

^effects of living in a weightless-zero ‘^’’^environment for an ex-
‘tended period.

' The Hieronymuses’ most startling claim was the discovery of what
they term a lethal radiation belt round the moon, which during the
finding of Apollo 11 apparently extended from an altitude of roughly
;»xfy-five miles down to approximately fifteen feet above the moon's
ijJ. e. While the astronauts were traveling through or within this belt,
Hieronymus noted a drop in the vitality as measured by his wife on the
wx ” But when two of the astronauts got out of the capsule and

Radionic Pesticides 339

climbed down the ladder onto tuna firmd, he says the trends showed 3
spectacular turnaround.

In following later flights of the Apollo series, Hieronymus found that
the lower level of the mysterious lethal atmosphere was as high as two
miles above the moon’s surface. Hieronymus believes further that its
altitude may alter depending on a given time period or on its exact
position above various spots on the moon’s surface, or both, but states
that extensive observations will be required to confirm this.

No less interesting was Hieronymus confirmation that the energy he
was picking up from the spacemen appeared not to be related to any of
those on the electromagnetic spectrum. When the capsule was on the
far side of the moon relative to the earth, no radio or other telemetered
signals could be transmitted back to the Houston base. The astronauts
were thus out of contact with their earthbound guides. Not so with
Hieronymus, who says he was able to monitor them during this period
on his analyzer. On the other hand, when the capsule was on the far side
of the moon relative to the sun, i.e., in the moon’s shadow, radio signals
were easily sent to and received from earth, whereas Hieronymus
analyzer went “dead” and could pick up nothing. This seemed to
confirm the idea, hit upon by Hieronymus when he was growing plants
in his cellar, that the energy received by his analyzer was in close

association, if not carried on, sunlight rays.

A German-born engineer, Rolf Schaffranke, working as a propulsion
expert for American corporations contracting with NASA in Huntsville,
Alabama, who as a young student watched the launching of the first
man-made rocket, the V-2, from the secret German base at Peene-
miinde, wrote of Hieronymus’ experiment: “Sounds absolutely crazy.
Yet it really happened. Numerous observers are firmly convinced that
the experiment is repeatable. Repeatable anywhere, any time, with as

many witnesses present as desired.”

Wondering whether eloptic energy could be carried not only on lig
rays from our sun but on those from all cosmic bodies including planets,
Hieronymus took a ten-power telescope from an ordinary navigations
sextant onto the roof of bis house in Lakemont, Georgia, and fixed it
so that it could be constantly directed at any spot in the heavens.

340 THE RADIANCE QF LIFE

F

_

pff. After focusing on Venus, he replaced the telescope’s eyepiece with
! metal disc penetrated by a hole, and soldered a wire to the edge of the

'v

" disc to conduct what he believed was eloptic energy down into the house
to the radionic device operated by his wife. Mrs. Hieronymus began to
run tests similar to those which had measured the vitality rates of the
astronauts’ bodily parts and systems so as to see if there was anything
that gave a similar response on the Venusian surface. Of the thirty-five
wavelengths received from astronauts’ organs and systems, half seemed
.to be tunable from Venus, the others not at all.

Perplexed by these findings, the Hieronymuses were suddenly struck
that they might be receiving energies from parts, not of animals, but of
plants. So they began running analyses on the organs of earthly plants
as if they were human beings.

Checking three trees, a mango, a willow, and a pine, Hieronymus
found that while they all had what appeared to be the equivalent of
lungs, pineal, thymus, and pituitary glands, adrenals, thyroids, stomachs,
a colon wall, a prostate, ovaries, and a nervous system, there were strange
differences among them. The mango alone, for instance, seemed to have
something akin to a lymphatic system, but, unlike both the willow and
the pine, no duodenum or spleen.

Hieronymus next checked Bermuda grass, which he knew does not
/ propagate by seeding itself but extends endlessly underground. Sure
enough, no sex organs could be detected for the grass according to his
readings, though a weed registered ovaries even when he had removed
; its seeds. Strangely, the Bermuda grass seemed to have the analog of an
appendix.

£■' The readings from Venus set on the tunings for each organ or system,
tor analog thereof, clearly indicated some structure on Venus similar to
tthat of earthly plants. Hieronymus concludes that there may well be a
form of Venusian plant life, though he has no idea what kind, or why
ithe vitality of its organs seems to be more than twice that of the earth
iplants he has tested; nor has he any idea whether such “plants” may have
no more than what occultists call etheric or astral bodies.

* By the summer of 1973, as a result of the publication of a series of
articles about him and his work in U.S. magazines devoted to the

Radionic Pesticides 341

unexplained, Hieronymus began to attract wider interest; his correspon¬
dence mushroomed with letters and calls asking for further information.

Still keenly aware of Rahn’s post-Hiroshima warning, and remember¬
ing with awe the com borers reduced to no more than “wet spots,”
Hieronymus is still leery of revealing all he knows. As he stated to the
authors: “While we are not intending to hold back scientific investiga¬
tion, we are not going to broadcast complete information on our tech¬
nology to the general public so that people can play around with it
irresponsibly any more than we would advocate giving dynamite and
matches to small children. If a group of responsible people will help us
to run a proper and broad investigation of eloptic energy for the good
of mankind, I will be glad to cooperate and tell them all I know.”

342 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 20

b-

About two decades before UKACO’s efforts to help the farmers of
Pennsylvania were put to rout by the chemical manufacturers and the
USQA, a book appeared in the United Kingdom called The Chain of
life by the British surgeon Guyon Richards, who had built up wide
Jtperience in medical problems as physician in charge of an entire
'“Strict for the Indian medical service.

He was stimulated by the theories of a colleague. Captain Sandes, who
®fooduced him to the little-known benefits of ionization and its remark-
£ effects on the treatment of disease* a branch of science later devel-
* n Germany and more particularly in the USSR, but almost wholly

neglected in other countries. Richards became, as he put it, “electrically-
minded,” and proceeded to make detailed galvanometric studies of
plants and people in health and disease, Of Abrams,Richards said it was
a pity that the very invention of the oscilloclast had, because its curative
properties could not be exactly explained, obscured from the medical
profession the important issues which Abrams had raised.

Richards’ book restimulated interest in radionics among a small cote¬
rie of imaginative British doctors who wanted to experiment with the
new healing process. Looking for an engineer who could help them build
the strange new equipment, they sought out an “English Hieronymus”
and found him in the person of an Oxonian, George De La Warr, a
psychically-gifted civil engineer.

Having built a series of instruments covered in black leather, which
came to be known as “black boxes,” about a year following the demise
of UKACO, the work of which they had no inkling, De La Warr and
his osteopath wife, Marjorie, found that they could affect the growth of
diseased or undernourished plants by focusing “radionic” energy straight
at them through a lens system, thus substantiating the claim of Hierony¬
mus, of whom they were also unaware, that it was optically retractable.
Like the UKACO partners, the De La Warrs found that they could
obtain equally successful results either by directly radiating a plant or by
beaming energy to it through one of its leaves or even its photograph.
Why this should be so remained a mystery to the De La Warrs, who
could only state: “It is still problematical whether it is the apparatus, the
photographic emulsion or the presence of a specific operator that pro¬
duces the effects—or a combination of all these factors.”

De La Warr further theorized that in addition to radiations of light
the emulsion on the negative receives from the subject other radiations,
the precise nature of which was unknown. There was also evidence that
a relationship perdured between a plant and a leaf detached from it, or
the expressed juice of that plant, just as it existed between one of
Abrams’ patients and his blood spot.

“It would appear,” wrote De La Warr, “that each molecule of matter
is capable of producing a tiny electrical voltage that is specific to itself,
and which ‘transmits’ rather like a tiny radio transmitter-receiver. *

344 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

■ collection of molecules, therefore, is capable of transmitting a generic
pattern. This means that the signal from a plant or human is quite
individual, and that each plant or person will receive a transmission on
their own generic pattern. It is here that the photograph plays its part,
as it is thought that the emulsion on the negative retains the generic
pattern of the object photographed and can be induced to re-radiate as

a carrier. Thus, with a photograph of a plant in circuit it is possible to
affect that plant at a distance.”

The theory was in no way airtight, but the results obtained by radion¬
ics were fantastic. Realizing that the presence of living organisms in the
soil is a prerequisite to good husbandry, the De La Warrs wondered if
they could treat the soil itself through the cells living within it by
radiating energy patterns effectively equivalent to plant nutrients. To
attempt this they determined to photograph the soil of garden plots,

treat the photos radionically, then plant vegetables in the treated soil to
see how they would fare.

They began with cabbages. Selecting two sites eighty feet apart, in
the curtilage of their laboratory, they removed all the topsoil. This they
thoroughly sieved and mixed to eliminate any possibility of soil variation,
then spread it back on the sites, allowing it to settle for a week.

On the 27th of March, 1954, they began a month-long treatment of
one site by radiating its photograph daily in their darkroom, leaving the
other site untreated. This treatment accomplished, they planted four
young cabbages, selected for their similarity, into the soil of each site.
For two weeks no difference in the rate of growth was observable,

N Caus * n § ^em to have doubts about the procedure. Thenceforth to the
end of June, the cabbages in the treated soil continued to grow larger
than those left to grow normally. Photographs taken some four weeks
before maturity revealed that the plants in the treated site were three
times larger than those left to grow normally.

Encouraged by this success, the De La Warrs decided to repeat the
experiment on a larger scale. They noticed that in one strip of garden
three rows of peas thirty-seven feet long were growing so uniformly as
to leave little doubt that the soil was of equal consistency throughout.

The peas were uprooted and the site prepared for fresh planting. The

Mind Over Matter 345

strip was divided into fifteen plots, six of which were photographed fro m
a bird’s eye view and treated radionically every day for one month. Two
plots were left untreated; seven others were used as buffers.

At the beginning of August, ninety-six Early English winter-resisting
broccoli plants, all seven inches high, were set out, six to a plot. The
radionically treated plots were rephotographed with the plants in them
and irradiated daily until the experiment was concluded in mid-January,
1955, after snow and ice had apparently stopped all growth. Accurate
weighing of the plants under the scrutiny of an expert from Oxford
University’s Department of Agriculture, Dr. E. W. Russell, who ob¬
served the experiment from beginning to end, revealed that an average
81 percent increase in total crop yield had been obtained for the treated
plants compared to the nontreated controls.

After successfully experimenting with lettuces, suggested by Russell
because they were fast-growing, the De La Warrs next decided to
broadcast treatment from their laboratories to a garden at Old Boars
Hill, two miles from Oxford. They laid out an equilateral plot, divided
it into four squares, and planted broad-leaf beans in each square. A single
square was photographed and irradiated from the beginning of May to
the beginning of August, 1955. At the end of the test, the height of the
bean plants grown in the treated square was 9 Vi inches greater than in
any of the other squares, and the number of pods greater than for all
the other plants combined.

Further to extend the distance between the soil treated and the
laboratory, the De La Warrs cooperated with a carrot grower in Scot¬
land. Soil samples taken from seventeen acres of a twenty-two-acre field
were irradiated at Oxford each day throughout the growing season.
When the carrots were pulled from the earth, those treated weighed out
20 percent heavier than the ones which were left alone. Pleased as they
were with the astonishing results they were obtaining, the De La Warrs
still had no idea why the radiation from their equipment affected the
growth of various vegetables so favorably.

During the next growing season in 1956, they decided to ascertain
whether an inert substance, if irradiated and mixed with soil, could
reradiate the nutritive energy patterns to the seeds during germination

346 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

■Bf gjjd growth. The substance they selected was “vermiculite,” a micaceous
Wm silica sold by the buiilding industry as an insulator, which was both
f T chemically inert and insoluble in water. To treat it they blew it into the
air for seven hours in front of a radionic apparatus normally used for
i i therapeutic purposes on humans.

They then mixed the treated vermiculite with a grass-seed mixture
containing rye, cocksfoot, and other varieties. The proportions were two
parts vermiculite to one part-grass seed by weight. The mix was sown
in two boxes; an identical mixture, containing untreated vermiculite,
was sown in two similar boxes. The soil was the same throughout. The
results, as confirmed by a leading agricultural firm, showed that the
treated vermiculite produced a crop 186 percent heavier in moist
weight, with a proteim content 270 percent higher, an extraordinary gain
for any farmer.

Milford oats, seeded with treated vermiculite in a yard-square plot at
. a rate equivalent to 252 pounds to the acre, when harvested five months
later produced at an estimated rate of two tons to the acre or a crop
270 percent larger than that obtained from an untreated square. More
uncannily, oat seeds .grown in a beaker of nothing but distilled water
containing not a single nutrient nevertheless grew luxuriously if treated
vermiculite was added to the water.

At this point a nationally known plant-breeding establishment re¬
quested to perform tests with the treated vermiculite on various types
of seed. Under the firm’s rigid test conditions, the phenomenal increases
in growth obtained by the De La Warrs were no longer apparent.

Instead of dejection, this news brought the De La Warrs to a stunning
realization: perhaps the plants had been responding all along not to the
radiations from their machines but indirectly to the human beings
involved in the experiments!

To test this idea they called up the plant-breeding firm and obtained
permission to run the very same tests the firm had performed on exactly
the same plots. To the amazement of the establishment's horticultural
staff, the De La Warrs were successful in increasing growth with treated
vermiculite to a significant degree but, try as they would, the professional
plant growers could not repeat the De La Warrs’ success.

Mind Over Matter 347

After three years of intense labor with plants, and out-of-pocket costs
of some $20,000, the De La Warrs had at last stumbled onto the crux
of the problem. A human factor of immense importance was confusing
the issue. To determine the extent of this factor they again mixed
vermiculite into the soil of potted oats. Their assistants, who daily
poured measured quantities of water onto the seeds, were told which
pots contained the treated substance, which the untreated. What they
were not told was that none of the vermiculite used had in any way been
irradiated and was as inert as when brought from the supplier.

Though every one of the oat seeds had received no nutrient energy
other than that provided by the soil itself, the De La Warrs were excited
to note that the seedlings in those pots which the assistants believed to
contain treated vermiculite were coming up faster than the others.
Human belief that a plant might grow faster was apparently acting as
a nutrient to actually produce faster growth. Thought was a food!

De La Warr, who considered this experiment the most important he
had ever run, found himself face to face with a shattering new reality
with the most far-reaching implications: the mind of a human being
could affect cell formation!

When De La Warr described this experiment to one of Great Brit¬
ain's leading physicists and suggested that a universal energy could be
evoked by the proper attunement of one's thoughts, he was told curtly:
"I do not believe you, Mr. De La Warr. If you can affect the number
of atoms in a growing plant by your thought process, we must revise our
concept of what constitutes matter."

“Indeed we must,” said De La Warr, “even if such revision poses a
whole overhaul of existing knowledge. How, for instance, could this
energy be incorporated into mathematical equations? What would hap¬
pen to the law of the conservation of energy?"

When De La Warr realized that the real key to getting plants to
flourish was simply asking them to do so, he published an article in his
journal, Mind and Matter , entitled “Blessing Plants to Increase their
Growth," asking readers to produce evidence to support his own experi¬
mental results, which were so at variance with accepted and current
materialistic atomic theory.

348 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

B| One of the most crucial steps in a fifteen- ; t e p procedure outlined in
■ X the article was that in which the experimen er was to hold bean seeds
jn his hands and invoke a blessing, varying according to his faith or
denomination, in a reverent and purposeful manner. Though warmly
received by readers, the article evoked a harsl re ply from officials of the
Roman Catholic Church, who took umbrage because, as they pointed
out, it was inadmissible for anyone below the ra nk of deacon to perform
any act of blessing. Laymen were supposed > n ly to ask the Creator to
perform a blessing. To still the waters of [ ro test, the De La Warrs
renamed their experiment “Increasing the R^ e Q f Plant Growth by the
Mental Projection of an Undefined Energy '

Many of their readers reported success s m ilar to that attained in
America by the Reverend Franklin Loehr, \hose 700 experiments on
the effect of prayer on plants, conducted by 150 persons, using 27,000
seeds, under the auspices of Loehr’s Religion Research Foundation in
Los Angeles, are reported in his book The t 0 wer of Prayer on Plants.
Loehr showed that the growth rate of plart s could be accelerated as
much as 20 percent when individuals singly (- [ n concert visualized the
plants as thriving under ideal conditions, "hough their experiments
seemed to be acceptable from the evidence pictures presented, the
results were ignored by scientists on the basithat Loehr and his assist¬
ants had no scientific training and used reitively crude methods to
measure growth.

However, Dr. Robert N. Miller, an indus r j a ] research scientist and
former professor of chemical engineering a Georgia Tech, began a
series of experiments in 1967 with Ambrose in d Olga Worrall, whose
feats of healing have become celebrated in th United States. Using an
extremely accurate method of measuring plat growth rates developed
by Dr. H. H. Kleuter of the United States Lpartment of Agriculture,
with accuracies up to one thousandth of q inch per hour. Miller,
working in Atlanta, Georgia, asked the Worr;] s to direct their thoughts
at rye seedlings from Baltimore, some 600 iiles away.

Whereas the growth rate of a new blade ,f rye grass had been ob-
. served by Miller to stabilize at 0.00625 inch i T hour, after he asked the
Worralls to think of the seedling at exactly 9» the trace on a graph

Mind Over Matter 349

indicating growth rate began immediately to deviate upward and by 8
a.m. the following morning the grass was growing at a rate 84 percent
faster. Instead of growing the expected inch in the interval, the
seedling had sprouted more than Yi inch. Miller reported that the
dramatic results of his experiment suggest that the sensitive experimen¬
tal technique could be used to measure accurately the effect of mind
over matter.

The mysteries of how the human mind may act through radionic
devices such as those of UKACO, Hieronymus, or De La Warr are yet
to be explained. In an amazing development, the late John Campbell,
editor of Astounding Science Fiction —since become Analog Science
Fiction/Science Fact —determined in the 1950s that a circuit diagram
of Hieronymus’ machine drawn in India ink worked as well as the
machine itself “Your electronic circuit,” he wrote to Hieronymus,
“represents a pattern of relationships. The electrical characteristics are
unimportant and can be dropped out completely.”

Voysey, an English dowser, corroborated the evidence by pointing out
that if he traces a line with pencil on paper, thinking strongly that this
mark will represent a certain metal, his pendulum will react to the drawn
line exactly as if it were the metal.

After a prolonged study of radionic devices sponsored by the Founda¬
tion for the Study of Consciousness set up by Arthur M. Young, inven¬
tor of the Bell helicopter, Frances Farrelly, who ran her own college for
medical laboratory technicians, also came to the conclusion that the
devices were not necessary to achieve effects. While working in England
with a Harley Street physician, she found she could walk toward a
patient with her hands outstretched and feel within her own body where
the patient had trouble. As she says: “1 was beginning to run the
instrument in my head, or mentally only.” Since then, Farrelly has been
able to make diagnoses of ills of individuals not only without a radionics
device but without a blood spot or a photograph or anything at all. The
mental image of a patient held in her mind is sufficient. She calls this
a “resonating reflex phenomenon.”

In the summer of 1973 Farrelly's talents were put to test in Prague
when one of the participants in the First International Conference on

350 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

S' Psychotronics—a Czech logism for the effects of mental energy on
matter—lost a wallet in the cavernous four-story Railway Workers'
. ’ Building, site of the conference. Within minutes, Farrelly tracked it
down, pinpointing its exact location inside a box at the back of a dark
closet where a cleaning woman had placed it for safekeeping.

The following day she was confronted by a professor from the Czech¬
oslovak Academy of Sciences who gave her a chip of mineralized rock
and asked her before a large audience if she could state its origin and
age. Rubbing the table before her to get a radionic type “stick,” Farrelly,
after putting a dozen questions to herself, stated that the mineral in
question came from a meteor and was about 3,200,000 years old, answers
which exactly matched the most considered conclusions of expert Czech
mineralogists.

■’ During her stay in England, Farrelly was intrigued that the De La
Warrs seemed to have radionically detected that every living plant has
a critical rotational position (CRP), which is apparently established by
the earth's magnetic field as the seed sprouts out of the ground. If the
seedling is transplanted in such a way that it continues to grow in its
CRP, it will thrive better than plants which have been transplanted out
of that orientation. This phenomenon was also independently discov¬
ered by Hieronymus, who found that a reading on the dials of his
-radionic device was maximum when the plant was rotated in a given
position with respect to a compass rose.

The De La Warrs had also found that, because of this apparent
relationship with the geomagnetic field, a plant has a pattern of radiation
Ground it. Nodal points within this pattern or web which seem to
? concentrate the field of radiation can be located by a portable detector
J: With a probe and a rubbing plate similar to that on their radionics device.

In England Frances Farrelly found that with a simple dowsing pen¬
dulum she could locate on a tree and in the domelike geometric pattern
'■around it nodal points of energy which could expose X-ray film.
y This field of energy may be related in some way to a magnetic field,

1 since both can be detected with dowsing methods. In Lorton, Virginia,
*the authors witnessed the incredible sensitivity to a magnetic field as
^displayed by Wilhelm de Boer, a Rutenmeister, or master dowser, who

>

Mind Over Matter 351

lives in the Hanseatic city of Bremen, West Germany. When Dr. Zaboj
Harvalik asked de Boer to walk through a magnetic field which could
be switched on or off, each time the field was on de Boers tiny dowsing
rod delicately held in his fingertips would revolve. When the field was
off, the rod would not move.

With the same rod de Boer measures the auras of trees and people.
First backing off from a large oak, he then advanced toward it until he
was about twenty feet away, at which point the rod flipped downward.
On a smaller tree de Boer had to approach more closely before there was
any reaction from the rod.

“This energy coming out of a large oak can temporarily increase the
strength of a human aura, or a person’s vitality,” said de Boer, demon¬
strating that it extended some nine to ten feet outward from Harvalik’s
chest but was double that length after Harvalik hugged a big oak for two
minutes. De Boer related how the “Iron Chancellor” of Germany,
Bismarck, at the advice of his personal physician, would put his arms
around a tree for up to half an hour to recover from the fatigue of
pressing duties.

Harvalik stated that the aura de Boer was measuring might not be the
same as that seen around human beings by sensitives, to which the
Britishers, Dr. Walter Kilner and Oscar Bagnall, devoted much atten¬
tion, since it seemed to extend further from the body. As Harvalik put
it: “We don’t really know exactly what this extended aura is and we
certainly have no way to analyze it in a physics laboratory, at least not
yet.”

Whether the auric field as measured by de Boer is the same as the
one which contains the “nodal points” as revealed on film by Frances
Farrelly is also as yet unanswerable. It appears that when the material
substance with which the field is associated is broken up, the field goes
with the individual parts which remain in contact even at a distance.
This led the De La Warrs to wonder if a slip cut from a plant and rooted
would benefit from the radiations emitted by its “mother” or pine away
in the absence of such radiation. Incinerating a mother plant, roots and
all, they found that its motherless children did not thrive as well as
similar shoots taken from a mother which was permitted to continue
growing.

Most incredible to J. I. Rodale, who successfully repeated the De La
Warrs’ experiment, was the allegation that the mother plant did not
necessarily have to be growing near her children for them to benefit from
her “protection.” The mother could apparently be in the next city, the
next country, across the ocean, or anywhere on earth. If so, suggested
Rodale, it would tend to indicate that all living things, including human
babies, get protective radiations from their mothers, that radiations
might underlie “love at first sight” and that people with “green thumbs”
are emitting radiations beneficial to their plants.

That an energy comes from the hands of a healer—as was claimed of
Jesus Christ—and that this energy can increase the growth of plants
seems to have been proved in a scientific experiment on sprouting seeds
by Dr. Bernard Grad, a research biochemist at Allan Memorial Institute
of Psychiatry of McGill University in Montreal. Taking the “healing
controversy” into his laboratory, he performed some careful experiments
with the cooperation of a retired Hungarian Army colonel, Oskar Es-
tebany, who became aware of his own extraordinary healing powers
during the Hungarian revolt against the Soviet occupation of his country

in 1956.

Grad’s.jneticulous experiments, written up in the Journal of the So¬
ciety for*Bsychical Research and the International Journal of Parapsy¬
chology indicated that the sprouting of grains and the total amount of
green plant issuing therefrom could be significantly increased when
compared to controls, by watering them with a solution sealed in bottles
and exposed only to the healing energy of Estebany’s hands.

In his first rigidly controlled experiments Grad convinced himself that
by holding the cages of wounded mice, but not actually touching the
animals themselves, Estebany could heal their wounds faster than if the
mice were exposed to heat or left untreated. Estebany also could retard
the growth of goiters produced in the mice by iodine-deficient diets and
goitrogens and hasten their disappearance when the mice were returned
to a normal diet.

Grad wondered what results might be obtained from subjects other
than Estebany. From the many patients available at the institute he
chose a twenty-six-year-old woman with a depressive neurotic reaction
and a thirty-seven-year-old man with a psychotic depression. He also

Mind Over Matter 353

selected a psychiatrically normal man of fifty-two. What Grad sought
to ascertain was whether a solution held for thirty minutes in the hands
of a normal individual would cause plants to grow at a faster rate than
a solution held for the same amount of time by neurotics and psychotics.

After the threesome had held sealed bottles of saline solution, their
contents were poured on barley seeds embedded in soil. Grad found that
the little plants watered by the saline solution held by the normal human
being grew significantly faster than those held by the psychiatric pa¬
tients, or by a control group left untreated. The plants treated by the
psychotic grew the slowest. Contrary to Grad’s expectations, the plants
treated by the neurotic grew at a slightly higher rate than the controls.

Grad noticed that when the psychotic was given the sealed bottle to
hold he expressed not the slightest reaction or emotion, whereas the
neurotic immediately inquired about the reason for the procedure and,
when told, responded with an expression of interest and what Grad
termed a “brightening of mood.” Grad also observed that she lovingly
cradled the bottle in her lap as a mother would a child. Grad reached
the conclusion that “the important fact for the purpose of the experi¬
ment was not the state of her general diagnosis but of her mood at the
time she was holding the bottle.” In his detailed account of the experi¬
ment Grad reported to the American Society for Psychical Research
that it would seem that a negative mood, such as depression, anxiety,
or hostility while treating the solutions would result in an inhibition of
cell growth when plants were watered with that solution.

Grad saw the implications of his experiment to be far-reaching. If a
person’s mood could influence a saline solution held in the hands, it
seemed natural to assume that a cook’s or housewife’s mood could
influence the quality of food prepared for a meal. He recalled that in
various countries menstruating milkmaids were not permitted in that
part of the dairy where cheese was being prepared because of a presumed
unfavorable effect on the bacterial cultures, and that during their men¬
strual periods women have been held to influence negatively the canning
of perishables, the stiffening of egg white, and the survival of cut flowers.
If Grad s experiments were correct, it was not the menstruation but the
depression created by it in certain women that had the effect, a discovery

354 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

which removes from the realm of prejudice to the realm of science the
biblical injunction against “unclean” women.

The whole subject of radionics and the part played by the action of
the human mind—and whether it interacts with various radionics de¬
vices designed by De La Warr, Hieronymus, Drown, Abrams and others
—stands on the very frontier of physics and metaphysics and the no-
man's land which lies between them.

As Galen Hieronymus said to the authors: “Is the force and its
■ manipulation basically in the realm of the psychic? We know that
powerful psychics such as Frances Farrelly can produce results with no
help whatsoever from a device. But others seem to be helped by a
radionics instrument even when, like the De La Warrs, they have
well-developed psychic powers ”

Hieronymus has tried his best to separate the action of the human
mind from whatever the various “boxes” do to interact with it. “1 can
take an ordinary empty cigar box and mount a tuning dial on top of it,”
he says. By properly setting the dial at a given tuning, some psychics
have been able to cure a given disease. I think they do this because they

believe that they are using the box when, in reality, they are using only
psychic ability.

On the other hand, we are able without question to run analyses of
ill persons and, having made our diagnoses, give information to third
parties on how to set dials on healing instruments when those persons
know nothing about radionics and are merely following instructions.
The proper setting of the dials seems to have important effects. So there
are two sides to the question which await resolution.” Hieronymus says
that a good friend, an Episcopal minister in Florida, received a hand-
carved ebony cross from the family of an old Scottish vicar who had died
in Great Britain. Touched, he replaced the metal cross which he nor¬
mally wore around his neck with the ebony cross each time he offered
holy services. A short time later he told Hieronymus that he felt exhaust-
ingly depleted after each church service.

As a long-time “radionic detective,” Hieronymus questioned his
friend whether he had not done something different during the services
which seemed so to fatigue him. When the clergyman remembered the

Mind Over Matter 355

substitution of crosses, Hieronymus tested his friend’s vitality with and
without the ebony rood around his neck. Whenever the black cross was
worn, the minister’s vitality dropped almost to the zero point on the
device’s dials.

Hieronymus suggested to his friend that he exorcise the gift cross.
This accomplished, the minister no longer felt any debilitating effects.
The two friends concluded that negative thoughts from the old vicar had
lodged in the ebony cross and the energy therefrom was affecting its new
owner.

The experiments run on certain strange figurines made of baked clay,
stone, and bone discovered at Acambaro in the Mexican state of
Guanajuato by Waldemar Julsrud offer impressive evidence that matter
can receive malevolent energy and store it for long periods of time,
perhaps thousands of years.

Professor Charles H. Hapgood in his manuscript, Reports from Acdm-
baro, says of the huge Julsrud collection, numbering over 33,000 ar¬
tifacts, that it cannot be identified with any of the known cultures of
Mexico but suggests relationships not only with specific Indian tribes of
the Western Hemisphere but also with peoples of the south Pacific and
Africa. Researchers sponsored by Arthur M. Young’s foundation se¬
lected a few examples which appeared to the eye as most evilly weird.
After putting them individually in cages together with mice, they found
that the tails of some of the mice turned black and fell off and that other
animals died after only a night’s exposure to the objects. There was
evidently a malevolent energy—of a kind usually associated with voodoo
—present in the evil-looking artifacts which was capable of destroying
a mouse.

If mental intercession can act malevolently to destroy life, it is also
clear, as the radionic process proves, that it can act benevolently to
enhance life. In his unique paper, “Radionics, Radiesthesia and Phys¬
ics,” published by the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine,
Professor William A. Tiller, chairman of the Department of Material
Science at Stanford University, who devoted part of a year-long stay in
England to the study of radionics at the De La Warr laboratories,
presents a model to explain how the process works.

356 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

I

The basic idea in radionics [writes Tiller] is that each individual, orga¬
nism, or material radiates and absorbs energy via a unique wave field
which exhibits certain geometrical, frequency and radiation-type charac¬
teristics. This is an extended force field that exists around all forms of
matter whether animate or inanimate. A useful analogy here is the physi¬
cal atom that is continually radiating electromagnetic energy in the form
of waves because of its oscillating electrical dipole movement and its
thermal vibrations. The more complex the material, the more complex
the wave form. Living things, like humans, emit a very complex wave
spectrum of which parts are associated with the various organs and sys¬
tems of the body.

Tiller holds that if the millions of new cells bom in our bodies each
day come into being in the presence of fields polarized by the radionic
process, they tend to grow in a healthier configuration, which weakens
the original field of an abnormal or diseased structure. Continued treat¬
ment eventually molds the healthy organ structure and the condition is
healed.

Following Hindu Yoga philosophy, Tiller postulates further that there
are seven principles operating in man, each of which constitutes a
different type of substance that obeys a unique set of natural laws. These
he lists as the physical , which most of us simply call the “body”; the
etheric, or what the Russians have termed the “bioplasmic”; the astral ,
or emotional body, followed by three separate intuitive, intellectual, and
spiritual minds; and finally pure spirit or divine mind.

“These substances are presumed to exist everywhere in nature and to
interpenetrate with the human body, i.e., they all exist within the
physical atom and organize themselves within the body,” writes Tiller,
who adds that if one thinks of seven transparent sheets containing seven
different circuit patterns, each of a different color, and then overlays
them, one can thus visualize the complete organization of the different
levels of substance in the body. Although the different energy fields
perturb each other only in a small way, they can be influenced to do so
in a strong way, says Tiller, by the agency of mind.

Tiller points out that the seven endocrine centers of the physical body
—the gonads, cells of Lydig, adrenals, thymus, thyroid, pineal, and
pituitary—are paralleled in Hindu philosophy by seven energy vortices,

Mind Over Matter 357

or chakras , which are linked in the etheric body by a current of vitality.
This current, says Tiller, is associated with the meridians of acupuncture
and the points on them which, though known to the Chinese millennia
ago, have only recently been detected with an instrument that measures
electrical resistance.

One of our goals [continues Tiileri * s to arrange our etheric/physical
system so as to deliver maximum power to the physical body from the
environmental energy stream. One reason for wanting to tune the chak¬
ra/endocrine system relates to the transmitting of spiritual and healing
qualities into the earth environment. These seven endocrine centers have
been called our sacred centers and through them we radiate transmitting
information of a quality (frequency) associated with that center.

Tiller offers the example of the thymus gland, the center supposed to
control the quality of love in all its spectral range. He postulates that an
entity radiates from this gland a field that is broadcast through space and
is absorbed in the corresponding gland by another entity. This stimulates
the gland and generates some biological activity within the organism. If
the second entity radiates an in-phase vibration back to the first, then
the love consciousness can form a bond between them. Most of us, in
Tiller’s view, are confined to expressing love in so limited a way that it
is radiated at small power and has a restricted range of expression such
that only a few individuals will receive the radiation and be aware of it.
But, as Tiller puts it, "if the entity has built himself to radiate at large
power and over a very broad band of the spectral distribution, then
many, many entities will receive this radiation, be aware of this love and
be nourished by it.” Tiller’s statement fits well with Rexford Daniels
idea that altruism has a higher, and perhaps more powerful, set of
frequencies than egotism.

It also echoes the latest conclusions of Marcel Vogel:

A thought is an act of creation. It is what we are here for, to create,
to bring into being ourself by means of thinking. The way a thought can
be observed and measured by a simple life form, a plant, shows a wonder¬
ful relationship between man and plant. When we love, we release our
thought energy and transpose it to the recipient of our love. Our primary
responsibility is to love.

358 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

I!

m Another researcher to accept the power of the mind is a neurologist
| and medical electronics expert, Dr. Andrija Puharich, who has recently
c reported some of the most awe-inspiring feats of psychic, or mental,
} power yet to confront physicists, psychologists, and other academicians.
Author of The Sacred Mushroom (Doubleday, New York, 1959), which
dealt with the effects of hallucinogenic plants, such as peyote, a decade
before the world’s younger generation became absorbed with mind-
bending drugs, from marijuana to LSD, and of Beyond Telepathy (Dar-
ton, Longman and Todd, London, 1962) a decade before studies of
direct idea transference from one human mind to another were consid¬
ered anything but crazy by the "responsible” scientific community,
Puharich has now discovered a truly remarkable psychic in the body of
a young Israeli, Uri Geller, whose abilities have startled hundreds of
audiences and left most open-minded scientists aghast at their implica¬
tions.

Under rigorous test conditions, Geller has been able to unfailingly
locate an iron ball or water hidden in one of ten identical sealed metal
cans without touching the cans, to move solid objects at a distance
without the use of any energy known to physics, to bend at a distance
dense metal objects, such as a solid silver Mexican coin, as if they were
plastic in his hands, to repair broken watches and get them running
without having ever opened their cases, to shatter a set of watchmaker's
screwdrivers made of a special alloyed steel, and even to cause objects
to vanish from their locations and reappear somewhere else. Geller can
also affect at will the material recorded on a magnetic tape, such as that
used in television.

i Puharich has now organized a multi-disciplinary international group
of scientists to assess the abilities of Geller and of perhaps thousands of
other people who would reveal similar gifts if they were taken seriously
rather than considered freaks. A theoretical group which will take the
results of the experiments and seek to mathematically provide physical
constructs for them is being led by physicist Dr. Edward Bastin, member
of the "Epiphany Philosophers” at Cambridge University in England
and originator of the most advanced quantum theory.

The group will be asking such fundamental questions as: How can a

S

Mind Over Matter 359

I

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:l'

1 ikif-.'

• 1 1

:: -h ! --/

. ■* . ■

i

1 1

■> w i : 1
i "i i

■I f u ■;
J ■. {

coin disappear? What kind of space, or lack of it, is involved? arc
the energetics which operate during Geller s transformations and van-

ishings?

As Puharich told Connie Best, author of an article on Geller, “The
Man Who Bends Science”:

We’re trying to develop a model to explain how all these atoms can
be taken apart. There are theories of annihilation and so on in microphy¬
sics, but there is no theory in the world that can explain this on a
macroscopic scale. How can you take all these atoms apart or infinitely
compress them to the point where they are so tiny they are invisible, have
the thing parked in some unknown space, and then get the atoms back

reassembled?

Geller not only can miraculously affect the so-called inanimate world
but the world of living things as well. Before reliable witnesses he has
placed his hands over a rosebud for slightly longer than a quarter of a
minute, then opened them to reveal the rose in full and radiant bloom.
As Connie Best comments:

Physics is precise, unbending. Yet Uri Geller is finding loopholes in
science wide enough to pluck a rose out of. Uri Geller is bending physics,
forcing it to take account of the so-called paranormal powers of the
mind. How much will physics have to change? If the readings of meters
reflect the wishes of lab assistants, if the presence of an experimenter is
enough to embarrass sub atomic particles, how are we to know where we

stand?

As the Serbian-born American inventor and genius, Nikola Tesla,
stated before his death: “The day science begins to study nonphysical
phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the
previous centuries of its existence.”

Perhaps that decade is upon us.

360 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 21

The most advanced experiment involving communication with plants
has now developed in a remote corner of northern Scotland, with results
more radiant than have been achieved by any other means. On a barren,
wind-blown patch of gorse and sand overlooking the Firth of Moray, a
seedling community has taken root which may flourish into a marvel of
the Aquarian Age.

Three miles as the raven croaks from the battlements of Duncan’s
castle at Forres, and just south of the heath where the three witches
prophesied to Macbeth that he would be Thane of Glamis and Cawdor,
an ex-RAF squadron leader turned hotelkeeper decided to take up resi-

ji

=1

dence with his wife and three young sons in the derelict corner of a
caravan park on Findhorn Bay—a rubbish heap of old tin cans, broken
bottles, brambles, and gorse bushes.

Tall, ruddy, with the gentle manner of an English headmaster and the
dress of a country squire, Peter Caddy, who once walked two thousand
miles through the Himalayas, crossing Kashmir deep into Tibet, has
been a follower since young manhood of a school of adepts whose object
is to bring back beauty and wonder to this planet. Illumined by the
dictates of his conscience, or as he chose to call it, the will of an
all-powerful creative force revealed to him by his clairvoyant wife, Ei¬
leen, Caddy pulled up roots and moved to Findhorn one snowy Novem¬
ber day in 1962. Accompanying the Caddys was another sensitive,

Dorothy Maclean, who had left the Canadian Foreign Office to study
Sufism.

For some time the Caddys had been intent upon radically changing

their lives by turning away from mundane occupations and materialist

pursuits in order to enter upon what Caddy calls a long period of training

and preparation. During this period they planned to surrender every-

thing, including all personal volition, to a being they term “Unlimited

Power and Love,” whose will is manifest to them through the guidance

of a deceased Rosicrucian master whom they recognized in the flesh as

Dr. G. A. Sullivan, and in the spirit as Aureolus, or St. Germain, or the
Master of the Seventh Ray.

To be fair, the place in which the Caddys least expected to settle was
the unsightly, overcrowded encampment of mobile houses known as
Findhorn Caravan Park. For years they had hurried past it on their way
to and from Forres. Now some mysterious force was overriding their
aversion. Following what appeared to be crystal guidance, they wheeled
an old caravan onto the site of their new home—less than half an acre
in a hollow not far from the main cluster of trailers, a patch of land
composed mainly of sand and gravel, constantly swept by gale-force
winds, protected only partially by tufts of broom and quitch grass which
kept the sand from blowing away, and shaded by a belt of spiny fir trees.

With winter coming it was a dismal prospect. Following the concept
of the monks who used to build their monasteries by hand, putting love

362 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

i

[

and light into the fabric of the building with every stone they laid, the
Caddys cleaned their rickety trailer from top to bottom and polished all
the furniture, pouring in vibrations of love to cancel out the negative
vibrations they considered to be inevitable in structures built by people
interested only in money. Cleansing and hand painting the caravan was
a first step toward the creation of their own center of light.

As none of the Findhorn pioneers was employed, and their meager

resources would carry them through only one dark and clammy Scottish

winter, they dreamed of springtime and establishing a garden partly to

increase the protective shield of light round them and partly as a source
of healthy nourishment.

Short days and long nights Caddy pored over gardening books, which
he found contradictory in their recommendations. Written for horticul¬
tural enthusiasts living mostly on the mild southern coast of England
they were irritatingly irrelevant. When Easter rolled around to herald
a renaissance of the land, the arid, all but lifeless soil surrounding their
caravan seemed hopeless for growing anything comestible. Caddy, who
had never sown a vegetable seed in his life, felt like Noah when guided
to build an ark where there was no water; but he dutifully persisted.
Either guidance was to be followed to the letter or they might as well
return to the world of business. His Rosicrucian masters had taught him

one prime rule of life: “To love where I was, love whom I was with, and
love what I was doing.”

To receive the arcane guidance on which the infant community
planned its every move, Eileen would rise regularly at midnight and
meditate for several hours, bundling herself in an overcoat against the
chill of the Scottish nights, taking refuge in the only place that could
afford her absolute tranquillity, the trailer park's frigid toilet. Eileen had
read in a book that everyone receives his spiritual name at some point
in life and that only then can he begin his spiritual work in earnest. In
1953 she had felt the word Elixir branded on her forehead; so she
adopted the name, and from then on her guidance was constant.

In her clairvoyant vision Elixir saw seven cedarwood bungalows clus-
■ tered together, m the midst of a splendid garden, all trim and neat. How
; this vision was to materialize in the constricted squalor of the caravan

§ Findhorn and the Garden of Eden 363

site remained a mystery. Yet all were prepared to put their faith in her
clairvoyance.

The prospect of creating a garden seemed a superhuman task. The
ground was made of fine, dusty sand and gravel in which nothing grew
but tough pointed grass. Elixir received guidance that each time you put
a spade into the ground you put in your own vibrations, that the right
vibrations acted as a magnet to draw in like vibrations. Peter Caddy
cheerfully dug a strip of quitch turf three feet wide by nine feet long
and laid it to one side. He then dug down eighteen inches, accumulating
a pile of sand and gravel. In the clean trench he placed the strip of quitch
turf upside down and broke it up with his spade. This was to insure that
the turf would not sprout its way back up to the surface, but provide
nourishment as it disintegrated.

Repeating the operation with two more trenches, Caddy had a garden
nine feet by nine. His problem was to get water into the soil, a far more
difficult job than he imagined. The sand was so fine the water poured
onto it simply went into globules like quicksilver. Only by dint of the
most assiduous patience, by spraying the surface over long periods with
a very’fine spray, was it possible to impregnate the soil sufficiently for
it to hold the moisture. More stones and gravel had to be raked out;
finally the plot was ready for seeding. According to the local agricultural
experts and the available textbooks on gardening, nothing could be
grown in the Findhorn soil except perhaps a few lettuces and radishes.
Scanty fare for a family which had become accustomed at their hotel
to daily steak or duck washed down with good red wine.

Fortunately Elixir had been warned by her guidance that man is
eating the wrong food, drinking the wrong drink, thinking the wrong
thoughts, and making his body gross instead of a body of light. They
were to eat less dense food and begin to concentrate on making a real
garden, the fruit and vegetables of which, combined with honey and
wheat germ, would constitute the fare in the new age of refined bodies.

Conscientiously Caddy planted his lettuce seeds in an inch-deep
furrow made with the handle of his spade, placing the seeds a foot apart,
then raked them over. To sit in the sun and watch their garden grow
the Findhorners needed a fence, to fend off the ever-present winds

364 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

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blowing across the Moray Firth, and a level concrete patio. Sand they
had in abundance, but no cement, nor any money for its purchase.

Lumber for a slatted fence appeared as if by miracle from a man who
was dismantling his garage. As soon as the fence was up a neighbor ran
over to say that some barely damaged bags of cement had fallen from
a truck across the road. In a short while they had a fenced patio from
which to admire—not thriving young lettuce, but stunted apparitions,
attacked by wireworms.

What to do? Caddy had been warned by Elixir's guidance not to use
chemical insecticides. A neighbor chanced to pass and informed him of
a pile of seasoned soot just outside the entrance to the caravan park, an
admirable antidote to wireworms.

Caddy spread it carefully, without taking into account the wind which
that night blew it through the caravan, into hair, books, and clothing.
Luckily it rained and the soot was washed into the soil. By the end of
May they were eating luscious lettuces and radishes.

As Elixir's guidance informed them that chemical fertilizers were
toxic to the human body, a compost heap was essential if they were to
grow a greater variety of vegetables. Only, where to obtain the ingredi¬
ents? A pile of rotting grass was donated by a neighbor. A nearby farmer,
grateful for a rescued sheep, gave Caddy a large load of cow manure. A
friend who owned a riding stable allowed them to follow his horses with
bucket and shovel. A nearby distillery supplied them with free peat dross
and cummings, a natural barley-germ fertilizer. Seaweed they gathered
free from the beach. A bale of hay, dropped from a passing truck almost
at the gate of the park as if from heaven, served to cover the piles of
compost.

Relying on such “supermundane assistance,” the Findhorners acted
as if they were endowed. As one of them wrote: “We could have been
negative and said the soil was useless—as it was. Instead we put hard
work and positive thought into everything we did.” Caddy began work¬
ing from morning till night, putting sweat and radiations into the soil,
his object to grow sufficient vegetables and salads to provide a large part
of their diet in the months to come. Along with pure air, sunlight, sea
bathing, and plenty of cold, pure water, they hoped gradually to purify

Findhom and the Garden of Eden 365

their bodies and endow them with energy, on the theory that the more
refined their bodies became the more they would be able to absorb
cosmic energies and the less solid food they would need.

The Findhorners planted watercress, tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach,
parsley, squash, and asparagus. As a living wall against an unruly Dalma¬
tian they planted hedges of blackberries and raspberries round their
garden, which began to spread beyond the caravan till it covered two
acres of ground, every bit of soil of which had to be manufactured from
old turf and new compost, every square inch manhandled several times
in the process.

Within two months the results were stunning the neighbors, who, not
knowing of the spirit in which the Caddys were going about their
gardening, could not understand what was happening, especially when
the Caddys’ cabbages and Brussels sprouts were the only ones in the area
to survive a plague of cabbage-root grubs which eat away at the roots
of the plants, and their harvest of black currants grew healthily by the
bushel, whereas the crop largely failed in the rest of the county.

Findhorn lunches began to consist of salads with over twenty ingredi¬
ents; surplus quantities of lettuce, radishes, spinach, and parsley were
disposed of round the county, which was suffering a shortage. Their
evening meals included two or three vegetables from the garden, grown
without fertilizer or insecticides, freshly picked and freshly cooked.
Stews from garden vegetables consisted of onions, leeks, garlic, carrots,
parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, artichokes, kohlrabi, celery, squash,
potatoes, flavored with all kinds of herbs.

Elixir was told to let her mind dwell on each ingredient when making
a salad, or a ratatouille, that her thoughts and feelings were important
in the continuing cycle of life. She was to appreciate whatever she was
doing, whether peeling a carrot or podding a pea, and to consider each
pea or bean a living thing in her hands. Of the peelings and garbage
nothing was to be wasted. All was to go back into the compost and the
soil, constantly increasing the live vibrations. The only drawback to this
life was that when they were obliged to go into town, or on a short
holiday, they found it very difficult to support normal food. Elixir be¬
came so sensitive it was painful for her to go near the noxious vibrations
of so-called civilization.

366 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

When midsummer came they were ready to preserve quantities of
raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries, putting up altogether a hun¬
dred pounds of jam. They pickled fifteen pounds of red cabbage, and
large quantities of cucumbers. In a newly built garage they stored
potatoes, carrots, beets, and shelves full of shallots, garlic, and onions.
During the winter they prepared the earth for the following season and
planted more fruits, altogether some twenty species, including apples,
pears, plums, greengages, cherries, apricots, loganberries, and boysenber-
ries. By May of 1964 the fruit trees and bushes were bursting into bud.

When estimating the number of red cabbages the Findhorners would
need for the following season Caddy calculated that with an average

weight of three or four pounds they would require no more than eight.
To the Findhorners’ amazement, when the cabbages matured one of
them weighed thirty-eight pounds and another forty-two. A sprouting
broccoli, mistakenly planted as a cauliflower, grew to such enormous
proportions that it provided vegetables for weeks; when eventually
pulled out of the ground it was nearly too heavy to be lifted.

It began to dawn on Caddy that there might be some greater underly¬
ing purpose behind what was happening at Findhorn, that they must be
involved in some mysterious pioneering venture, some larger experiment
in group living, that the garden might be the nucleus of some larger
experiment in New Age living, a sort of training course in the realization
that Life is a Whole.

In June of 1964 when the county horticultural adviser came to take
a sample of the soil for analysis, his first comment on arrival was that
the soil would require a dressing of at least two ounces of sulfate of
potash per square yard. Caddy replied that he did not believe in artificial
fertilizers, that he was happy using compost and wood ash. The adviser
said that would be totally inadequate.

Six weeks later, when the adviser returned bringing the results of the
analysis which had been carried out in Aberdeen, he acknowledged with
some bewilderment that the analysis had found no deficiencies in the
soil sample. All necessary elements, including rare trace elements, were
present. The adviser was so astonished by the results that he asked
Caddy to take part in a broadcast about the garden in which the adviser
would take the chair and an experienced gardener using conventional

Findhorn and the Garden of Eden 367

I

I

methods with chemical fertilizers would debate with Caddy. Caddy says
that at the time he still did not feel it appropriate to expound to the
public on the subject of the spiritual side of their endeavor and again
he attributed the success solely to organic manure and compost.

By now they were growing sixty-five different kinds of vegetables,
twenty-one fruits, and over forty herbs, both culinary and medicinal. For
some time Dorothy Maclean had also been receiving extraordinary
spiritual guidance of her own and had adopted the spiritual name of
Divina. She learned from the aromatic plants in the garden that their
unique wavelengths could serve special functions for humans, affecting
different parts of human anatomy as well as the human psyche, some
plants being good for wounds, others for eyesight, others for human
emotions. She realized that by raising the quality of her own vibrations
she might eventually open the doors to a whole new spiritual realm of
plant life. It became clear to her that human thinking, human passion,
human anger, human kindliness and affection, all have far-reaching
effects on the world of plants, that they are most susceptible to human
thoughts and emotions, which affect their energy. Poisonous and bad-
tempered moods have as depressing an effect on plants as happy, uplift¬
ing frequencies have a beneficial effect. It occurred to her also that bad
effects could come back to humans as they ate the produce they had
infected with bad vibrations. Thus the whole cycle could become vi¬
ciously descending, leading to more and more misery, pain, and disease,
or hopefully ascending, leading to greater joy and greater light.

Divina says she realized that the most important contribution that
man can make to a garden—even more important than water or com¬
post—is the radiation he puts into the soil while cultivating it, such as
love, and that every member of a group has something to contribute in
the way of radiations—strength, happiness, and so on. Everything that
comes into a human being through inspiration of one sort or another
goes out again modified in wavelength, tone, and timber by the will of
the person involved; he or she can improve the quality of what is sent
out and increase the brilliance of its wavelength.

At the same time Divina realized that the soil and plants are con¬
stantly being affected by radiations from the earth itself and from the

368 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

I

cosmos, each of which contributes to its fertility, without which both
soil and plants would be sterile; these radiations, she realized, were more
fundamental than chemical elements or microbiotic organisms, radia¬
tions that are subject fundamentally to the mind of man. Man appeared
to have the role of a demi-god; by cooperating with nature he might find
no limit to what could be achieved on this planet.

In the spring of 1967 Elixir—who still received the overall policy
guidance for the venture—was told that the garden was to be extended
even further and made into a place of beauty with the planting of many
kinds of flowers. The center was to be expanded and new bungalows
built. The vision she had first received on arriving at Findhorn was now
beginning to materialize. Money for neat cedarstrip bungalows turned
up as if by miracle, and the bungalows were soon surrounded by impec¬
cable flower gardens.

In 1968, when Findhorn was visited by a number of accomplished
gardeners and agricultural experts, they were amazed at what they
found, remarking they had never seen such a uniformly high standard
in all sections of a garden. The growth and color of the flowers in the
new herbaceous borders were so remarkable that the visitors were at a
loss to explain the phenomena, considering the poverty of the soil and
the rigorous northern climate. When Sir George Trevelyan, who for
twenty-four years had run the famed Adult Education Foundation at
Attingham, dropped in at Easter he was amazed by the quality of the
daffodils and narcissi growing in beds crowded with shorter flowers, all
as beautiful and large as he had ever seen, their brilliant colors of a
scintillating quality. He found the root vegetables the best he had ever
tasted, and was surprised to find fruit trees of all sorts in blossom, as well
as a vigorous young chestnut standing eight feet high among broad¬
leaved trees and shrubs thriving on the landward slope of windswept
dunes.

As a member of the Soil Association, with an interest in the organic
method. Sir George said he had seen enough to know that compost and
straw mulch alone mixed with poor and sandy soil were not enough to
account for such a garden. There must, said he, be some Factor X to
be taken into consideration, adding that if so much could be accom-

Findhom and the Garden of Eden 369

i

. i i

plished at Findhorn in such a short time the Sahara could be made to
blossom.

In June of 1968, Miss Armine Wodehouse, of the Radionic Associa¬
tion, who ran a commercial truck garden in Wales for twenty years
visited Findhorn and was amazed at the lush crops she found, especially
when she noted the pure sand thinly spread with compost and the
powerful winds that swept uninterruptedly across the garden. She felt
the strawberry plants would arouse the admiration of any gardener, and
was surprised to find moisture-loving asters and primulas, which are
notoriously thirsty, thriving in such soil.

Mrs. Elizabeth Murray, an independent organic gardener and mem¬
ber of the Soil Association, who visited Findhorn in July of 1968, felt
that the radiant health of the trees, flowers, fruit, and vegetables was far
beyond the ordinary. She felt the compost was of such poor quality when
mixed with sand that it could not explain the superb produce, which for
size, quality, and flavor was superior to anything she had ever seen
anywhere. She too was sure that such results could not have been
attained on such barren soil simply by good husbandry and compost.

Lady Mary Balfour, sister of Lady Eve, who describes herself as an
“ordinary gardener of the organic school/' spent twenty-four hours at
Findhorn in September of 196S and wrote: “The weather throughout
was grey and at times wet. Yet in retrospect I can see that garden in
brilliant sunshine without a cloud in the sky, which must be due to the
extraordinary brilliance of the blooming flowers I saw there. The flower
beds were all a compact mass of color."

Lady Cynthia Chance, a follower of Rudolf Steiner's Biodynamic
farming methods, was astounded when Peter Caddy told her he did not
need to apply Steiner’s methods, that he had a more direct spiritual way
of obtaining the same results. A United Nations agricultural expert and
professor of agriculture at various universities, Professor R. Lindsay
Robb, when he visited Findhorn just before Christmas went on record
to say that the vigor, health and bloom of the plants in the garden at
midwinter on land which is almost a barren powdery sand cannot be
explained by the moderate dressings of compost, nor indeed by the
application of any known cultural methods of organic husbandry. There
are other factors and they are vital ones.”

370 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

I

j At which point Peter Caddy broke down and let out to Sir George
j Trevelyan the secret of their success at Findhorn. He said that Dorothy
; Maclean, or Divina, had managed to get into direct contact with the
devas or angelic creatures who control the nature spirits that are said by
clairvoyants to be everywhere at work nurturing plant life. Sir George,

; an advanced student of the arcane, of astrology and the hermetic
sciences, admitted he was aware that a number of sensitives claimed to
1 be in touch with the devic world and to be working with it, that Rudolf
j Steiner had founded his Biodynamic methods on such knowledge. Far
i from scoffing at Caddy s explanation, he was prepared to give it credence
and to validate it by suggesting that conscious investigation of such
worlds is of the utmost importance to our understanding of life, and
especially our understanding of the life of plants.

In short order Peter Caddy put out a series of pamphlets describing
; the true nature of the experiments at Findhorn. Divina contributed
i detailed descriptions of the messages she said she received directly from
; devas, of which she described whole hierarchies responsible for every
| fruit and vegetable, for every flower and weed. Here was a Pandora’s box
| more phenomenal than the one opened in New York by Backster.

; Findhorn quickly developed into a community of over a hundred
; disciples. Young spiritual leaders turned up to preach the gospel of a
; New Age, and a college was founded in the community to teach the
tenets of this New Age. What had started as a miraculous little garden
appeared to be turning into a true center of light for the Aquarian Age,
visited annually from every continent of the globe.

| Parting the veil into other worlds and other vibrations beyond the
limits of the electromagnetic spectrum may well go a long way to explain
the mysteries which are incomprehensible to physicists who limit their
looking to what they can see with their physical eyes and their instru¬
ments. In the more ethereal world of the clairvoyant, who claims to have
mastered the art of ethenc and astral vision, a whole new series of vistas
opens up around plants and their relation to man, to the earth, and to
the cosmos. The growth of seeds and plants, as Paracelsus intimated,
may indeed be affected very strongly by the position of the moon, the

positions of the planets, their relation to the sun and to the other stars
of the firmament.

Findhorn and the Garden of Eden 371

Fechner’s animistic vision of plants being ensouled becomes less of
a wild conceit, as does Goethe’s concept of a prototype plant. Burbank’s
knowledge that whatever man wishes he can produce with the aid of
nature or Carver's insistence that nature spirits abound in the woods and
take part in the growth of plants may have to be reviewed in the light
of the discoveries of the Theosophists and especially of such extraordi¬
nary seers of nature spirits as Geoffrey Hodson. The ancient wisdom, as
detailed by seers like Mesdames Helena P. Blavatsky and Alice A. Bailey,
throws quite another light on the energy of bodies, both of humans and
of plants, as well as the relation of individual cells to the entire cosmos.

The secret behind Pfeiffer’s Biodynamic compost, which has been
proved so highly effective scientifically, turns out to be a homeopathic
wonder based on a fairyland creation of Rudolf Steiner's organic brews
made by burying cow horns filled with cow dung and deer bladders filled
with nettles and camomile leaves. Steiner’s anthroposophy, or Spiritual
Science, throws such a light on plant life and agriculture as to make
scientists root in their tracks.

Aesthetically, the world of the devas and the nature spirits turns
out to be even more full of color and sound and perfume than the
creations of Scriabin and Wagner, their gnomes, nymphs, and un¬
dines, their fire, water, earth, and air spirits closer to reality than the
Holy Grail and the eternal quest it engendered. As Dr. Aubrey
Westlake, author of Pattern of Health , describes our imprisoned
state, we are locked in a “valley of materialistic concepts, refusing to
believe there is anything other than the physical-material world of
our five senses. For we, like the inhabitants of the country of the
blind, reject those who claim to have ‘seen’ with their spiritual vi¬
sion the greater supersensible world in which we are immersed, dis¬
missing such claims as ‘idle fancies’ and advancing far ‘saner’ scien¬
tific explanations.”

The attraction of the seer’s supersensible world, or worlds within
worlds, is too great to forgo, and the stakes too high, for they may
include survival for the planet. Where the modern scientist is baffled by
the secrets of the life of plants, the seer offers solutions which, however

372 THE RADIANCE OF LIFE

incredible, make more sense than the dusty mou things of academicians;
'hat is more, they give philosophic meaning to the totality of life. This
ipersensible world of plants and man, only touched on in this volume,
'ill be explored in another, The Cosmic Life of Plants.

i

Findhom and the Garden of Eden 373

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392 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Index

Abrams, Albert, 317-23, 333-8, 344,

355

Academy of Pedagogical Sciences

(U.S.S.R.), 206

Academy of Sciences (Fr.), 171, 186
Academy of Sciences (ILS<), 55, 187
Academy of Sciences (U.S.S.R.), 66, 73,

77

Acres USA , 272

Adamenko, Viktor, 203, 205, 207
Afghanistan, 224-6
Africa, 189, 256, 314, 356
Agricultural Chemicals , 328
Agricultural Testament (Howard), 234,
242

agriculture, see specific subjects

Albrecht, William, 221, 223, 239

Allen, Floyd, 267

Allen, Judith, 248

American College of Surgeons, 188

American Indians, 24, 356

American Medical Association, 254-5,

322

American Organization of Agricultural
Chemists, 263
Ames Research Center, 53
Anchor College of Truth, 60-61
Andrews, Donald Hatch, 161
Angushev, Georgi, 70
animats, 314-15, "electricity,” 4, 169-70,
196; as food, 250-1, 305-6, 375;
geomagnetism and, 209-10, 288-9;
health, fertilizers and, 220ff.; health,
nutrition and, 224-5, 227-8, 231,
238-9, 250-1; “magnetism,” 170-2,
188, 196, 209, 335; manures, see
Composting; Fertilizers, organic;
mummification and dehydration,

299; pesticides and, 252, tissues,
parallels to, 85ff.; transmutation of
elements, 275-6
animism, 14, 121fL, 372
anthroposophy, 372
Argosy , 18

Aristotle, ix, 105, 113, 164, 234
Arizona Farmer, 328

Armstrong, Howard, 325-32, 338-9
Army (U.S,)> 40
Association for Research and
Enlightenment, 65
Atlantic Electronics Ltd,, 52
atomic physics, 280fF
Audus, L J , 182
auras, 172, 200-13, 352
Aurea Catena, 118
Austen, Sir Robert, 88
Australia, 255
Austria, 97, 102, 170-1
Aviation Week and Space Technology,
182-3

Babylonia, 105
Bach, Edward, 307-11
Backster, Cleve, 3-19, 21, 27, 28, 33-4,
37, 40-3, 47, 48, 56-8, 60, 66-71,
159-60

Bagnall, Oscar, 352
Bailey, A. R,, 73-4
Bailey, Alice A., 372
Bailey, Liberty Hyde, 131, 176
Balfour, Lady Eve, 230-1, 233, 239
Balfour, Lady Mary, 370
Baltimore Sun, 8
Baranger, Pierre, 278-80
Barmakian, Richard, 290-1
Barr, James, 322
Bastin, Edward, 359
Beausoleit, Baron de, 296
Beebe, William, 235
Bell, Allan, 42
Belov, I., 202-3
Belton, Peter, 150-1
Benjamin, R. M., 328
Bergson, Henri, 101, 196
Berthelot, Pierre, 189-90
Bertholon, Abbe, 168-9, 173, 179
Bertrand, Didier, 280-1
Best, Connie, 360
biochemistry, 275ff.
biodynamics, 243, 263-b, 268, 288,
370-2

Bio-Dynamics y 245

Bioelectric Fields and Growth (Lund),
T87

Biological Essence of the Kirlian Effect
(Inyushin), 203

Biological Transmutations (Kervan) 281
288, 290-1

bioluminescence, 201 ff.
biometre, 300-1
bioplasma, 41, 203ff., 357
biorhythms, 163-4, 197
Bishopp, F. C. 328-30
Bismarck, 352

Blavatsky, Helena P., 113, 372
Bloch, Felix, 331-2
Boehme, Jakob, 25, 45, 110
Bondurant, William M., 15
Book of the Secrets of Enoch, 161
Borgstrom, Georg, 237-8
Bock, Hieronymus, 105

Bose, Jagadis Chandra, 78, 82-103 122
137, 140, 187
Botanical Gazette , 94
botany, 104ff.

Bovis, Andre, 299-303, 306, 323
Bradley, C. W., 52

Breakthrough to Creativity (Karagulla),

^ 10

breeding plant, 65ff,, 229; burbanking,

127ff,; cross-pollination, 126; seed
diagnosis, 196

British Association for the Advancement
of Science, 84, 86
British Medical Journal, 225, 322
British Society of Dowsers, 74
Broglie, Louis-Victor de, 287, 303
Broman, Francis F., 153-4, 157
Brongniart, Adolphe Theodore, 107
Brunton, Sir Lander, 96-7
Buchholz, Wilhelm H. S., 110
Burbank, Luther, 60, 127-34, 238, 372
Burdon-Sanderson, Sir John, 88-9
Burr Harold Saxton, 16, 195-7, 199,

Bush, Vannevar, 332
Butler, Robert N., 308
Byerly, T. C., 219
Byrd, Eldon, 40-2

Caddy, Peter and Elixir (Euleen)

362-71 '

Caesalpinus, Andreas, 105
California, 266—7
California Psychical Society, 27
Calvin, Melvin, 76

Camerarius, Rudolf Jakob, 105, 108
Campbell, John, 350

Canada, 150-3, 182, 301, 338, 353-5
Canadian Journal of Botany, 152
Canby, Eugene, 148

Carson, Rachel, 232, 253
Carver, George Washington, 136-42
217, 250, 372
Cayce, Edgar, 65, 139
Cazzamalli, Federico, 57
cellular consciousness, 11—14
Center for Bio-Energetic Analysis,

212

Century Magazine f 152-3
Cerminara, Gina, 21
Chance, Lady Cynthia, 370
chemistry, 173, 274-91
Chertkov, V., 63-4
China, 205, 228, 291, 281, 358
Christian Crusade Weekly, 157
chromatography, 244-5, 263-4
Ciba Foundation Symposium, 58
classification, botanical, 105, 108, 162
Closing Circle (Commoner), 220-1
Cobbett, William, xiv
Cocannouer, Joseph A., 237-8
College of Universal Wisdom, 57-8
color, xiii, xiv, 119; auras, 204, 207-
therapy, 190; see also Light
Commoner, Barry, 220-1, 287, 291
communication, plants and, 9-10 22ff
37, 55, 57, 59, 132^4, 136-7; "

biological, 47fL; cellular, 11-14, 68,
198-9; conversation, plant-human,’
42-4; devices operation, 34ff.;
electrical energy and, 186-8 198-9
^SP ” 5ff„ 18ff„ 28-9, 32, 34ff„ ’
40ff„ 58-9, 67ff„ 132-3,211-12;
extraterrestrial (CETI), 47ff., 60-2;
Findhorn community as working
example of, 361-71; interaction,
25-8; negativity and, 24;
parapsychology and, 57ff.;
plant-plant, 73-4, 124, 352-3-
remote, 9-11, 15, 37fF„ 47ff„ will
and/or prayer, effect of, 19-20
348-50

Comparative Anatomy of the Ansels
(Fechner), 122

Comparative Electro-Physiology (Bose),

composting, 229, 243, 257, 262, 268,

288

conditioned reflex, 69

Cortaro Management Co., 323, 325

Cosmic Energy, 24

counting, by plants, 43-4

Cox, H. Len, 182—4

crescograph, 98-9, 101

Crile, George Washington, 188, 195,

197, 320, 332
Crooks, Sir William, 88
Crops and Soils Magazine, 182
crystallization patterns, 243-^f

394 INDEX

Curtis, Olga, 156-7
Czechoslovakia, 350-1

Daniels, Rexford, 298-9, 358
Dark Ages, 105

d'Arsonval, Jacques Arsene, 186
Dart, R. Williams, 44—5
Darwin, Charles, ix, x, xii, 6, 88, 97,
109, 113, 116, 119, 125-9, 145-6,
234-5

DDT, 249, 252, 255, 270
Dean, Douglas, 8, 208-9
death: of plants, 94, 97; response to, II,
13-14, 68, 198-9, 318
de Boer, Wilhelm, 351-2
De La Warr, George and Marjorie,

344-56

de Loach, Ethel, 208-9
De Materia Medica (Dioscorides), 105
Denmark, 171
Denver Post, 156-7
Department of: Agriculture, 60, 152,
254, 268, 291, 327-31; Health,
Education and Welfare, 254-5
De Sauer, Professor, 318
De Sexu Plantorum Epistula
(Camerarius), 105
D’EsIon, Charles, 171
devices operated through plants, 34ff.

De Vries, Hugo, 127-8
dew, 310
Dioscorides, 105

diseases: human, see Health, human;
Medicine and medical profession;
plant, see Pests and diseases
Dougherty, James Francis, 43
Douglas, William O,, 253
dowsing, 295-316; auras and, 352;

communication with universal force
298-9; foods, 299ff. ; herbal healing
and, 306-14; map, 298; minerals,
296fL; object location, 298;
radiation pattern, 351-2; sensor
area, body, 302; thought and, 350
Drake, Frank, 52-3
Driesch, Hans, 196
Drown, Ruth, 333, 355
Dubrov, A. P. f 288-9

earthworms, 234-5

ecology, 60, 74-6, 217ff., 237-9, 25Iff.,
267ff see also subjects
Edison, Thomas A,, 141
Edwards, Charles C. T 256
Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in
the Vegetable Kingdom (Darwin),
129

eggs, galvanometry and, 15-16, 29-30
Egypt, 281, 295, 299, 300

Einstein, Albert, 102, 283
elan vital, 196
Electrician, 84

electricity, 4, 59-60, 164ff,, I78ff .; see
also Radiation; subjects
Electro Cultur (Lemstrom), 176
Electroculture Corp., 183
electromagnetism, 163-77, 187ff.;

dowsing, 295ff. ; eloptic energy and,
336; see also Radiation; subjects
Electronics World, 56, 57
electrophysiology, 85ff.
electrovegetometer, 168-9
Eliot, George, 60
eloptic energy, 336ff.

Elster, Julius, 174
E-meter, 29-30

emotions: human, 31-2, 353, 358; plant
reactions, see Communication,
“ESP”; of plants, 11, 13-14, 59,
63ff.

endocrine centers or chakras, 357-8
energy, see specific forms, subjects
England, see United Kingdom
entelechy, 196

environment: autoregulation, 64-8, 123;
awareness of, xi-x, xiii-xiv, 3ff.;
22-3, 28, 40, 57, 59, 65; see also
specific subjects

ESP, see Communication; Psychics;

Thought, human
Esser, Aristide H., 8-9
Estebany, Oskar, 353
etheric body (bioplasma), 41, 203ff.,
357-8

Evelyn Wood Foundation, 195
evolution, 11 Iff., 125ff.

Ewell, Raymond, 258
Exultation of Flowers, 313-15

“fainting,” 7-8, 41
Fairchild, David, 131
faith healers, 208-9, 353
Faraday, Michael, 171
Farm Bureau: Ohio, 330; Pennsylvania,
326-30

Farrelly, Frances, 350-2, 355
Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 120—6, 134
Federal Trade Commission, 234
Fedorov, Lev, 202

Fertilization of Orchids (Darwin), 126
fertilizers: ash theory, 223; chemical,
inorganic, 60, 217ff., 232, 235, 241,
260-1, 267-8, 285, 287;
earthworms, 234-5; ecology and, 60,
217ff., 237-9, 251 ff., 267-8; health,
human and animal, and, 218, 220F.,
238-9; microorganisms, 235, 251-2;
organic (see r*fso Composting;

Index 395

fertilizers (cotit’d)

Organic agriculture), 137-8, 219,

227ff., 243, 251, 256-7, 261 ff.

Fetisov, V. M., 70-1

Findhorn (Scotland), 361-71

Finland, 175-6

Fliess, Wilhelm, 197

Fontes, Randall, 32

Food and Drug Administration, 250,

254-6, 267, 333

Food, Farming and the Future (Sykes),

232

food, human, viii-ix, 68, I26ff., 138-9,
364ff.; health and, 139, 224ff., 231,
234, 238-9, 241ff., 253ff., 268,

272-3, 285, 290-1; meats, chemicals
and, 250-1; meats, dowsing, 305-6;
dowsing, 300ff.; minerals and trace
elements, 238, 243, 246ff., 251, 256,
290-1; organic, 139, 224ff., 231,

234, 238ff„ 253ff., 261, 266-7,

270-1, 354ff.; pesticides and, 249,

253, 255; processed, 245-50, 255-6;

production, see Productivity;

proteins, 250-2; vitamins, 225,

243ff., 256

force fields, 172, 200-13, 357; see also
Auras; Radionics; subjects
Ford, Frank, 261
Ford, Henry, 141

Formation of Vegetable Mould through
the Action of Worms (Darwin),

234-5

formative forces, 243-4

forms, metamorphosis of, 11 Iff., 161-2

Foster, Sir Michael, 87

Foundation for Study of Consciousness,

350, 356 t

Fourth State of Matter (Grishchenko),

204

France, 55, 86, 101—2, 107, 116, 166—71,
184-6, 189-90, 196, 221-2, 236,
275-88, 291, 295-307, 311
France, Raoul, ix-xi, xiii-xiv, 108
Franklin, Benjamin, 167, 171, 175
Freud, Sigmund, 124, 197
Fryer, Lee, 268
Funk, Casimir, 225
Furon, Rene, 288

Galvani, Luigi, 4, 169-70, 195-6, 209,
299

galvanometry: eggs, 15-16, 29—30; plants,
3ff., 21ff., 32, 40ff., 65, polarity
changes, 41

Gardeners’Chronicle, 174
Gardini, Professor, 167-8
Garner, John, 140
Gassner, J. J, 170

Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 51
Geddes, Patrick, 99-100
Geitel, Hans, 174
Geller, Uri, 359-60
genetics, 127

geomagnetism, see Gravity; Polarity and
orientation

Germany, 55, 97, 105-25, 161-2, 166,
172-4, 196, 223, 277-8, 323-5, 343
germination, 282; lunar cycle and, 197,
282; orientation and, 182, 351;
psychic energy and, 351—2; radiation
and, 59-60, 173-4; radionics and,
346-7, 351-2
giantism, 189-90

Gilbert, William, 165, 166, 170, 172,

184, 277

Gilgit Agency (Afghanistan), 224-6
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, x,

109-19, 120, 162, 174, 245, 291,

372

Goldstein, Norman, 32
Goodavage, Joseph F., 53
Graber, Glenn, 268—72
Grad, Bernard, 353-5
Grass (Soloukhin), 72-5, 236
gravity, 166, 182; levity, 117-18;
radiation of metals and, 334; see
also Polarity and orientation
Great Britain, see United Kingdom
Greece, Ancient, 105, 161, 164, 172-3,
295

Green well, Sir Bernard, 230
Gregory, William, 172
Grishchenko, V, S., 204
Gres, Charles, 51
Gross, Henry, 298
Gross, Henry M., 326-32
growth, 97-9, 101; direction tendencies,
116—18; fertilizers, see Fertilizers;
tight spectrum and, 189ff.;
metamorphosis, 11 Iff., 161-2;
parapsychology and, 59-60;
photography, time-lapse, l88ff.;
radiation and, 59-60, 167ff., 178ff.,
I87ff; radionics and, 344ff.; sound
waves and, 59-60, 145ff.; thought
and/or prayer and, 19-20, 348ff.;
see also Productivity
Gunar, Ivan Isidorevich, 64-5, 72, 76-7
Gurwitsch, Alexander, 54-5, 187, 188,
195, 197-9, 204, 318

Haeckel, Ernst, 109
Hagaseth, Gaylord T., 152
Hahnemann, Christian Samuel, 323-5
Halacy, D. S., 173
Halbleib, Ernest, 267-8
Hale, William J., 329

396 INDEX

Hall, Manly P., 133

Hals, Jorgen, 51

Hanni, Eldore, 267

Hapgood, Charles H. t 356

Harmonia Plantarum (Kayser), 161-2

Harrell, Alvin M., 61

Hart, Don, 265-6

Harvalik, Zaboj V., 297, 298, 302, 352
Hashimoto, Ken, 42^4
Hashimoto, Mrs. Ken, 43
Hauschka, Rudolf, 245, 281-2, 324
Hay, Randall Groves, 180
Health Finder (Rodale), 234
health, human: auras and, 204, 21 Off.;
biorhythms, 197; dowsing, 306;
fertilizers, commercial, and, 218,

220; light spectrum and, 189fF.;
nutrition and, see Food, human;
ovulation detection, 196; pesticides
and, 249, 253, 255; psychic research
and, 30-1; resistance to disease,

306, 309; respiration, 31; see also
Medicine and medical professions
Hell, Maximilian, 4, 170
Helmont, Jan Baptista, 276
Henry, Joseph, 171
herbal healing, 306-14, 324-5
Herder, Johann G. von, 114
Hermes, Trismegistus, 161
Hertz, Heinrich Rudolph, 83^4
Hienton, Truman, 327, 329-30
Hieronymus, Louise, 339-41
Hieronymus, T. Galen, 333-44, 350,

351, 35506
Hill, W. B„ 137
Hindus, 22-3, 32, 357-8
Hinze, Phillip M., 272-3
Hodson, Geoffrey, 372
Hoffman, Samuel O., 321-2
homeopathy, 323-5
Homeotronic Foundation, 329, 338
Horst, Miles, 328
Howard, Albert, 226-39, 242, 291
Howes, T. K., 89-90
Hoyle, Fred, 286
Huang, B. H., 157-8
Hubbard, L. Ron, 29, 56-7
Hungary, 170, 246, 353
Hunzas, 224-6
Huxley, Julian, 102, 145-6

hybridization, 126ff.
hypnotic control of plants, 8, 28

India, 77-8, 81-103 passim, 146-8, 160,
224-30, 312, 314-15
Indian Journal of Medical Research, 226
individuality, 21, 132-3, 345
Institute of:

Agrophysics (Leningrad), 66-8

Automation and Electrometry

(U.S.S.R.), 197-8

Clinical and Experimental Medicine
(Novosibirsk), 197, 199
Plant Industry (Indore), 228-9
Research (Calcutta), 82, 98, 102-3
Integration, 57-8
intent, capability of, xi
Interference Consultants Co., 298
International Congress of Physics, 86
International Journal of Parapsychology^

14, 353

International Radionics Association, 338
intoxication, 94

Invisible Radiation of Organisms (Rahn),
188

Inyushin, Vladimir, 203-5
Ioffe, Abram Feodorovich, 66
ionization, 343-4
irritability, 85ff.

Italy, 57, 109-11, 114-15, 167-70, 181,
186, 281
Izvestiya, 66-7

James, William, 124
apan, 42^4, 288, 291
eans, Sir James, 56
ohnson, Ed, 61
Johnson, Kendall, 207-8
Journal of:

Acoustical Society of America, 158
Horticultural Society (G.B.), 174
Parapkysics (G.B ), 208
Society for Psychical Research, 353
ulsrud, Waldemar, 356
\ usta Smith, Sister M., 209

Karagulla, Shafica, 210

Karamanov, Vladimir Grigorievich, 66-8

Karlsson, L., 41

Kayser, Hans, 161-2

Keefer, Robert F., 238-9

Keller, Helen, 133

Kepler, Johannes, 161-2

Kervan, Louis, 274-7, 280-91, 301

Khimiya i Xhizn (Chemistry and Life), 76

Kilner, Walter, 352

Kirlian, Semyon Davidovich, 199, 201-3,
213

Kylian, Valentina, 201-3
Kleuter, H. H., 349

Knuth, William J., 323, 325-32, 338-9

Kohl, Daniel H., 220

Komaki, Hisatoki, 288

Kopp, J. A., 302

Korol’kov, P. A., 289

Krippner, Stanley, 206, 207

Krylov, A. V., 182

Kulagina, Nina, 30, 206

Index 397

Lakhovsky, Georges, 184-8, 301, 306,
320

Lamarck, Jean, 109
Lambert, Albert and Mrs., 297
Langman, Louis, 196
Latscha Filialbetriebe, 270
Lavoisier, A. L„ 275-6, 281, 283
Lawrence, L. George, 35, 46-51, 53-62,
151, 187

League of Nations Committee on
Intercultural Cooperation, 102
Lebedinskii, A. V,, 77
Lehrs, Ernst, 111-13, 117-18
Lemonnier, Pierre Charles, 167, 174
Lemstrom, Selim, 175-7, 183
Lenin, 289-90
Lepinte, Christian, 110
Lewis, Myrna I., 308
Libby, Willard F., 332
Liebeg, Baron Justus von, 223-4
Life, 333
life-fields, 196-7
Life Force, 24

light, 118-19, 189; flashes, plant, 174;
frequencies and effects of, 189ff.;
response to, 57, 64, 92; sun,
biorhythm and, 163—4
Linnaeus (von Linne), Carl, ix, 108, 162
Linnean Society, 90-1
Lipsett, Mortimer, 250
Literatumaya Gazette, 75
Little Book of Life After Death
(Fechner), 121-2
Lloyd George, David, 296
Locker, Arthur, 148
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 102, 186, 183
Loehr, Franklin, 349
Lombard, Jean, 287-8
Low Energy Transmutations (Kervan),
288

Lund, E. J., 187
Lundberg brothers, 266-7

Maclean, Dorothy (Divina), 362, 368-71
MacLean, Gordon, 298
magnetism, 164-7, 209-10; dowsing,
296ff,, 351-2; radiation of metals
and, 334-5; see also Animal (s);
magnetism; Polarity and orientation
Mairan, Jean-Jacques D. de, 163-5
malevolence, 355-6
Man or Matter (Lehrs), 111-13
Mangeldorf and Bros., Inc., 149
Marconi, Guglielmo, 48, 84, 98
Marine, Gene, 248

Mary Reynold Babcock Foundation, 15
Matin, Le, 101-2

matter: forms, Yogic, 357-8, nature and
creation of, 275ff.

Matveyev, M., 66-8
Maxwell, James Clerk, 83-4
Mayer, Jean, 255
Mayron, Lewis W., 195
McCarrison, Sir Robert, 224-6, 230-1.
238-9, 242

McGarey, William, 65
Mclnnes, Alick, 311-16
McKibben, E. G., 181
Measures, Mary, 151-2, 157
Medical World News, 14-15
medicine and medical professions, 139;
acupuncture, 205; diagnostic
techniques, 196, 199, 204, 21Off.,
297, 317ff,, 333, dowsing, 296-7,
302, 306ft; faith healers, 208-9;
herbal healing, 306-14, 324-5;
homeopathy, 323-5; ionization,
343-4; mesmerism, 170-1; nutrition
and disease, 224ft, 239, 241 ft,
353-6, 290-1; pathoclast, 334;
pesticides, 253; radiation, pathology
and, 318-23; radiobiology, • 186—8;
sound therapy, 308; see also Health,
human

memory, 9, 68-9, 72
Mendel, Johann, 127
Mendeleyev, Dmitri, 275
mental energy, see Thought, human
Merkulov, A., 68-9
Merta, Jan, 59, 209-10, 301, 303-4
Mesmer, Franz Anton, 19, 170-1, 188,
195-6, 209

Messegue, Maurice, 311
metals: electricity and, 169-71; molecular
reaction, 85ft; radiation, eloptic,
334-7

metamorphosis of plants, II Iff., 161-2
Mexico, 356

microorganisms, 235, 251—2, 284-6, 288
microscopy, 20
Midwest, 218-21, 267-8
Miller, Howard, 11
Miller, Robert N., 349-50
Milstein, George, 158-9
Mind and Matter, 348
minerals and trace elements: dowsing,
295ft; nutrition, 238, 243, 246ft,
251, 256, 290-1; transmutation,
275ft

mitogenetic radiation, 54-5, 318
Molisch, Hans, 102
Molitorisz, Joseph, 178-9
Monteith, Henry C., 207
Montelbono, Tom, 26
moon: cycle, effects of, 197, 282;

radiation belt, 339-40
morphology, 11 Iff., 161-2
Moss, Thelma, 203-8, 213

398 INDEX

movement, ix-x, xi, 123, 125; growth
measurement, 98-9, 101;
mechanical, 91 ft; tropistic, 99-100,
125, 155-6

Murr, Larry E., 179-80
Murray, Elizabeth, 370
Museum of Science and Industry
(Chicago), 165-6

music: plants and, 145-62 passim ,
therapy, 308; see also Sound(s)

Nanna, or the Soul-Life of Plants
(Fechner), 121, 122, 124, 125
Nation (British), 97
National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, 53
National Plant Food Institute, 220
National Wildlife, 14
Natural Food Associates, 253-5
Natural Transmutations (Kervan), 287
Nature, 85, 95-6, 102, 182
nature as teacher, 134, 141-2, 238
Nature et Progres, 287
Nature of Substance (Hauschka), 281-2
Nauka i Religiya (Science and Religion),
68

Nauka i Zhizn (Science and Life), 72
Naumov, Edward, 206
Navy (U.S.), 40
Nebel, Long John, 33-34
Neiman, V. B., 289
Nelson, Elmer, 226
nervous breakdown, 56, 58-9
nervous systems, 32, 65-6, 71-2, 93ff.,
122, 12506, 187
Netherlands, 127, 167
New Alchemy Institute, 273
New Creations in Fruits and Flowers
(Burbank), 126-7
Newman, John, 176-7
New Statesman, 100-1
New York Times, 159-60
Nichols, Joe, 219-20, 241-58, 262,

305

Nichols, W. S., 325

nitrogen fertilizers, 60, 218-21, 239; see
also Fertilizers

Nollet, Abbe Jean Antoine, 166-8, 173,
178-9

North Carolina State University, 157-8
North Carolina, University of, 152
Northrop, F. S. C., 195-6
Norway, 51
nuclear physics, 280ff.

Odyle, Od, or odic force, 172-3, 188
Oersted, Hans Christian, 171
On the Causes of Plants (Theophrastus),
105

On the History of Plants (Theophrastus),
105

“On the Metamorphosis of Plants’’
(Goethe), 115-16

organic agriculture, 137-9, 241ff., 227ff.,
25Iff., 259fL; Findhorn community,
364ff.; see also subjects
Organic Gardening and Farming, 60,

234, 241, 267, 291
orgone energy, 29, 173, 283
orientation, see Polarity and orientation
Origine de la Vie, L' (Lakhovsky),

184-5

Origin of Inorganic Substances (von
Herzeele), 277-8
Origin of Species (Darwin), 125
Osborn, Fairfield, 290
oscilloclast, 321-2, 344
Osteopathic Physician, 209
Ostrander, Sheila, 203
Ott, John, 164
Ott, John Nash, 189—95

Panishkin, Leonid A., 64—5
Paracelsus, 110, 170, 307-10, 371
Parapsychological Association, 58
parapsychology, 57ff., 206ff,; see also
subjects

Parapsychology Foundation, Inc., 12-13
pathoclast, 334
Pathometric Association, 334
Pavlov, Ivan, 69, 70

perception, primary, 6, 14, 34ff.; see also
Communication

pests and diseases, 227, 241, 286; organic
agriculture and, 227ff,, 252, 268-9;
pesticides, chemical, 229, 249,
252-3, 255, 267—8, 270; radiation
and, 182ff., 198-9; radionics and,
323, 325-33, 338-9, 344; ultrasonics
and,150-1

Pfeffer, Wilhelm, 145-6
Pfeiffer, Ehrenfried, 243-5, 262-5, 288,
291, 334, 372

Phenomena of Life: A Radio-Electrical
Interpretation (Crile), 188
Philippines, 237, 249
photochemistry, 190, 194
photography: Kirlian, 199, 201-10, 213;
radionic, 323, 325ff., 344ff.; remote,
cross-section, 333; time-lapse, 188ff.
photosynthesis, viii, 76-7, 190, 194
Physico-Clinical journal, 322
Picton, Sir Lionel J., 242
Pierrakos, John, 210-13
Pip Records, 158-9
Pittman, U. J., 182, 318
Plant Response as a Means of Phys¬
iological Investigation (Bose), 94

Index 399

Plants with Personality (Synge), 189
Podshibyakin, Anatoli, 205
polarity and orientation, 118, 166,

288-9; animals, 209-10, 288-9;
critical rotational position, 351;
plants and, xiii, 41, 182, 351;
dowsing and, 299
Popenoe, Oliver, 271
Popular Electronics, 18, 35, 58-60
Power of Movement in Plants (Darwin),

125-6

Power of Prayer on Plants (Loehr), 349
/Vovda, 63-4, 72
prayer, effect of, 348-50
Prevention , 152, 234
Priestley, Joseph, 165
Pringsheim, Peter, 18
productivity, 237, 258; breeding, plant,
129ff., 229; electrical energy and,
176-7, 179ff.; fertilizers, see
Fertilizers; organic farming, 229,
232-3, 26Iff., 268, 271-2, 365ff.;
radionics and, 345ff.; sound and,
147ff.; symbiosis and, 236-7, 263-4
products, industrial, 135-42
Project Cyclops, 53
Project Ozma, 52-3
protective devices, xii
Prout, William, 276
psi-fields, 58

psychanalyser, 18

Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron

Curtain (Ostrander and Schroeder),

203

psychic energy, 19ff.
psychic research, 30-31, 44-5, 56ff.,
359-60; see also specific aspects
Psychic Science Temple of Metaphysics,
44-5

psychics; auras and, 172, 206, 208ff.;
clairvoyance, 362ff.; energy effects,
30, 359-60; plant response to, 55,
364ff.; psi-fields, 58; radionics and,
350ff.; weight loss, 31
Psycho-Galvanic Response, 30
psychokinesis, 44, 206, 359-60
Psychological Stress Evaluator, 42
psychophysics, 122-3
Public Health Service, 247-8, 255
Puharich, Andrija, 359-60
Purcell, Edward, 331
Pushkin, V. N., 69-72
Puthoff, Hal, 29-30

quality tests, 243-5, 263-4

radiation, xiii-xiv, 24, 184; auras, 172,
200—13, 352; biological, 47ff., 184ff.;
cosmic, 163—4, 166, 173, 185, 191,

197, 204ff.; diagnostic use, 196,

199, 204, 210ff, 297, 306, 317ff.,
339-40; dowsing, 295-316;
electromagnetic, 166ff., 178ff.;
eloptic, 336ff.; geomagnetic, see
Gravity; Polarity and orientation;
light frequencies, 189ff.; "love” and,
352-3, 358; metals, 334ff.;
mitogenetic, 54-5, 318; moon, belt
around, 339-40; pathology and,
318-23; patterns and nodal points,
351-2; pest control, 323, 328-32;
psychic control, 30; radioactivity,
174, 275, 322; radionics, 317-42,
344ff.; radio waves, 83ff.; TV,

139ff see also subjects
Radiation Control Act, 195
radiobiology, 186-8
radio-cellulo-ascillator, 185
radionics, 317-42, 344ff.; astronauts,
physiological monitoring, 339-40;
growth and, 344ff.; human factor
(see also Thought, human), 336-7,
348ff.; malevolence, 355-6; metals
and eloptic energy, 334ff.; pesticide,
323, 325-33, 338-9; pathology and,
318—23; space exploration and,

339-41

Rahn, Otto, 187-8, 195, 197, 337
Ravitz, Leonard J., Jr., 197, 199
Rayleigh, Lord, 83, 84, 89, 101, 102
Rayner, M, C., 236
reaction time, 10-11
Reader’s Digest, 8
reflex arc, 93
reflexophone, 320-21
Reich, Wilhelm, 29, 3i-2, 172-3, 203,
283-4

Reichenbach, Baron Karl von, 172-3,

188

religion, 44-5, 118, 349, 357-8, 22-3
Religious Research Foundation, 349
Renaissance, 105, 295-6
resonating reflex phenomenon, 350-1
Response in the Living and Non-Living
(Bose), 78, 91

Retallack, Dorothy, 153-7, 159-60

Richards, Guyon, 343-4

Riccioni, Bindo, 181

Robb, R. Lindsay, 370

Roberts, Kenneth, 298

Rocard, Yves, 296

Rockwell, R. A., 326-32

Rodale, J. I., 152, 233-4, 238, 241, 353

Rodale, Robert, 291

Roll, W. G., 58

Roman Empire, 105, 295

roots, x, 66, 125, 191

Ropes, Paul, 195

400 INDEX

Rose, Mason, 273
Rosicrucianism, 109, 118, 362
Ross, Cleon, 159-60
Ross, William, 173-4
Royal Society (British), 84, 85, 87-91,
96-7, 101-2, 139
Royster, L, H., 157-8
Russell, E. John, 235
Russell, E. W , 346
Russia, see Soviet Union
Rutherford, Ernest, 275

Sabarth, Erica, 244-5, 262-3
Saga, 53

Salisbury, Frank B-, 160
Sandes, Captain, 343-4
San Jose Mercury, 21
Sapp, Debbie, 25—6
Saturday Evening Post, 337-8
Sauvin, Pierre Paul, 33—41, 44—5, 47
Schaffranke, Rolf, 340
Schenberg, Christopher von, 296
Schiller, Johann C. F. von, 116
Schroeder, Lynn, 203
Science Advisory Committee, 255-6
Science et Vie, 278-80, 283
Science News Letter, 331
Scientific American, 39, 99, 322, 338
Scientology, 29-30, 56-7
Scotland, see United Kingdom
Scott, Cyril Meir, 161
Scribner, James Lee, 180-1
seaweed, agricultural use of, 268-9
Seeger, Charles, 53
Seigler, E. W., 330
selection of plants, 22, 65, 132
Sergeyev, Genady, 206
sentience, 125-6

sex, xii, xiii, 105-8, 125; cross-pollination,
126; ‘‘ESP,” 29, 38
Shaw, George Bernard, 97
Shelley, John, 298
Shchurin, S. P., 197-9
Siemens and Halske Electric Co., 55
Silent Spring (Carson), 232, 253
Simoneton, Andre, 295, 298-308, 317
Sims, Fletcher, Jr., 261-5, 268
Sinclair, Upton, 322
Singh, Rabindar N., 238-9
Singh, T. C., 146-8, 149, 151
Sinyukhin, A. M., 77
Smith, George E,, 149-51, 153
Smithsonian Institution, 50
Society for Psychical Research
(American), 354

Society for Psychical Research (British),
176

soil, 217-39, 260-1, 269-70, 280-1,
284ff.; see also subjects

Soil Association (U.K.), 233, 287, 369
Soil, Crass and Cancer (Voisin), 221
Solly, Edward, 174
Soloukhin, Vladimir, 72-6, 236-7
souls, plant, ix, I2lff, 372
Sound of Music and Plants (Retallack),
160

sound(s), xiii, 150, 166; atomic, 161;
growth and, 59-60, 145ff.; pest
control, 150-1; therapy, 308;

“voice” of plants, 42-4
Soviet Union, 30, 35, 41, 53-5, 59-60,
63-78, 123, 151, 181, 182,

197-208, 213, 236-7, 288-91, 296,
308, 343

space: communication, 47fF, 60-2;

eloptic energy', 339—41; exploration,
radionics and, 339—41; moon,
radiation belt of, 334-40;

Spare, Fred, 255
Spindler, Henri, 277-8
Spiritual Science, 282-3, 372
spiritualism, 44-5
Spencer, Herbert, 91
Standard Handbook for Electrical
Engineers (Newman), 177
Star Markets, 270-1
Steiner, Rudolf, x, 119, 212, 243, 245,
-282, 288, 370-2

Stellartron, 61
Stephenson, W. A., 268
stimulus response, 85ff.
structure, xiii, 341; metamorphosis,

11 Iff., 161-2; nervous systems, 32,
65-6, 71-2, 93ff„ 122, 125-6, 187;
roots, x, 66, 125, 191
Swann, Ingo, 30
Swanson, Robert, 32
Sweden, 108,186

Switzerland, 65-6, 116, 170, 243, 271-2,
302

Sykes, Friend, 231-3, 239, 253
symbiosis, 236-7, 263—4
Symphony of Life (Andrews), 161
Synge, Patrick, 189-90
Synge, R. L. M., 222

Tackett, Mrst Arnold C., 195
Tagore, Rabindranath, 85, 90
Tarakanova, G. A., 182
technology, organic farming and, 272-3
television: programs, 23, 26, 42, 157;

radiation, xiv, 189ff.; signal delay, 52
temperature sensitivity, 94, 189,. 270
Temple Buell College, 15307, 159
Tesla, Nikola, 48, 360
Texas, 259-66
Texas State University, 187
Theophrastus, 105

Index 401

Theosophy, 113, 204, 372
Thiel, Eldred, 267
Thomas, Wesley. 212
Thompson, Silvan us, 165
Thomson, John Arthur, 100-1
thought, human: creativity of, 357-8;
device control, 34ff., 44, 350;
diagnosis by mental image, 350-1;
as energy, 30-1; malevolence,

355-6; power, paranormal (see also
Psychics), 359-60; radionics and,
336-7, 348ff.; transference, 359;
transmission, 4, 186; willed or
prayerful, effect of, 19-20, 348ff,;
see also Communication
Tiller, William A., 206-3, 210, 356-8
Time, 190

Times (London), 84-5, 101
Tirniryazev Academy of Agricultural
Sciences, 6 Y-6 5

Tirniryazev, Kliment Arkadieivich, 77
Tisserant, Cardinal, 296
Toaldo, Giuseppe, 168
Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de, 105
“Training of the Human Plant’’
(Burbank), 133-4
transmutation of elements, 275ff.
transpiration, x-xi, 167
Trevelyan, George L., llln, 113-14,
369-71

tropism, 99-100, 125, 155-6
Tsimbalist, Tatiana, 64
Tucson Weekend-Reporter, 325
Tuskegee Institute, 137-40

UKACO, Inc., 326-32, 338-9
Ullman, Montague, 205
ultrasonics, pest control and, 150-1
ultraviolet, 189-90, 193
United Kingdom, 51-2, 55-8, 73-4,
83-97, 100-1, 125-6, 165, 171-4,
176-7, 182, 189-90, 222-33, 236,
246-7, 268, 275-7, 286-7, 296,
307-16, 322, 338, 343-53, 359-71
unity, universal, 10-11, 24, 85ff, 101-3,
316-17

uni version, 186

Upton, Curtis P., 323, 325-32, 338-9
Urorganismus, 113

van Tassel, George W., 57-8
Variation of Animals and Plants Under
Domestication (Darwin), 128
Vauquelin, Louis Nicolas, 275-6
Vincent, Warren, 266
Vines, Sidney Howard, 89-90
vitamins, 225, 243ff., 256
Vogel, Marcel, 17-32, 197, 277, 358
Voisin, Andre, 221-3, 239, 291

Volta, Alessandro, 169-70, 299

von Herzeele, Albrecht, 277-8, 281-2

von Littrow, J. J., 51

voodoo, 356

Voysey, 350

Walczak, V, Michael, 290
Wallace, George J,, 252
Wallace, Henry Cantwell, 136
Waller, Professor, 91, 101
Walters, Charles, Jr., 272, 291
Wasserman, G. D., S8
Waste Products of Agriculture: Their
Utilization as Humus (Howard),

229

water: dew, 310; dowsing, 295ff, 303^4;
electro-osmosis, 166-7, 178-9; floral
elixirs, 310-14; soil fertility and,
260-1, 257; transfer, 73^4
weather sensitivity, xiii
Webber, H. J., 131
weeds, 182, 236-7, 264
Weeds: Guardians of Soil (Cocannouer),
237

Weinberger, Pearl, 151-2, 157

Weltwoche, 65-6

West Germany, 270

West Indies, 226-7

Westlake, Aubrey, 372

White, George Starr, 180

Whittaker, John, 272

Wieck, John, 265

Wiggelsworth, G. W., 333-4

Wiley, Vivian, 19-20

Williams, Roger J., 253

Wills, Glen, 334

Wodehouse, Armine, 370

Woodlief, C. B., 158

World's Work, 131

Worne, Howard, 285-6

Worrall, Ambrose and Olga, 349-50

Wrench, G. T., 226

X-rays, 189

Yale Medical School, 16
Yoga, 22-3, 357-8
Yogananda, Paramahansa, 133
York (Pa.) Dispatch, 328-9
Young, Arthur M., 213, 350, 356

Zabelin, L, 75

Za Rubezhom (Abroad), 65-6
Zendavesta (Fechner), 124
Znaniya Sila (Knowledge Is Power),
69-72

Zook and Ranck, 271
Zoroastrianism, 124

402 INDEX

The Secret Li£e o£ Plants Tompkins and Bird II

Occult / New Age

Exploring the world of plants and its relation to mankind as revealed by the latest discoveries of
scientists, The Secret Life of Plants includes remarkable information about plants as lie detectors and
plants as ecological sentinels; it describes their ability to adapt to human wishes, their response to
music, their curative powers, and their ability to communicate with man. Authors Peter Tompkins
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could save or destroy the planet-may come from the bottom of your garden.

“Almost incredible ... bristles with plenty of hard facts and astounding scientific and practical lore.”

-S.K. Oberbeck, Newsweek

“This fascinating book roams ... over that marvelous no man's land of mystical glimmerings into the
nature of science and life itself.” - Henry Mitchell, Washington Post Book World

“In can't ‘get inside a plant’ or ‘feel emanations’ from a plant and don't know anyone else who can,
that doesn't detract one whit from the possibility that some people can and do ....

According to The Secret Life of Plants, plants and men do interrelate, with plants exhibiting
empathetic and spiritual relationships and showing reactions interpreted as demonstrating physical
force connections with men. As my students say, 'hey, wow!' ”

-Richard M. Klein, Professor of Botany,
University of Vermont (in Smithsonian)

Harper

Collins